It’s officially Spring Break up here in the PNW! Too bad the airlines know all about it. It’s super expensive to catch a flight out of Portland these days, or at least it’s too expensive for our family’s budget. We do have plans to take a family trip to Denver soon but we saved nearly $700 on airline flights when we decided to be flexible with our travel days.
So, on this Official Week of Spring Break, we are enjoying a Portland Staycation. I was thinking over the weekend that it would be a lot of fun to take the kids into the city + do a few food tours: ice cream, doughnut, bakery, hot dog… I wanted to stop in at some popular spots around the city + feast on what only Portland can offer us.
For absolutely no reason at all, I thought we’d start with an ice cream tour. After a quick online search, I found out that “tour” was the wrong word + “crawl” was far more popular for such a thing. (Here I was, thinking I had a new idea. Nope.) All that was left to do was to narrow down the number of ice cream shops I intended to visit, keeping in mind that I didn’t want to make my 7yo + 4yo sick in the process. The location of each of the ice cream shops came into play as well. I didn’t want to have to do too much driving back + forth over the Willamette River.
As it turns out, Southeast Portland was created with Ice Cream Crawls in mind. I found five local ice cream shops within 7.5 miles from each other. Perfect. To make it more fun, I thought we could rate each of the Ice Cream Shops to see if we could agree upon a family favorite, so I designed an Ice Cream Crawl Scorecard. I also made a cute little Ice Cream Crawl Map for us to follow. The kids really loved the inclusion of the map! Turns out, one of the Ice Cream Shops that I had hoped to visit wasn’t open for business on Mondays. I thought about removing it from the map but decided against it, just in case one of you guys might want to include it on your Portland Ice Cream Crawl. =)
Equipped with our maps, scorecards, pens + hungry bellies, we drove into SE Portland. Here are the Ice Cream Shops we visited:
- Cloud City, SE Woodstock Blvd
- Ruby Jewel, SE Hawthorne St
- Salt + Straw, SE Division St
- Fifty Licks, SE Clinton St
- Hurry Back, SE 13th + Lexington (closed on Mondays)
Let’s move on to the photo fun, shall we?!
The results are in. Drumroll, please…Wouldn’t you know it. Each of the three of us chose a different winner.
7yo – Cloud City
33yo – Salt + Straw
4yo – Fifty Licks
This was such a fun afternoon spent in Portland with my Little Ones. I guarantee you’d have a blast doing it in your town too.
P. S. Don’t forget, you can download + print the scorecards + map here!
P. P. S. To save on cost, we ordered kids cones at each location, which I strongly encourage you to do – unless you want a belly ache + an empty wallet.
