Portland Oregon City Tour

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Life in a Frontier Seaport Town

The City driving tour is your escape to Portland--adventures, farm to table flavors, educational scenic touring & specially crafted by My Chauffeur to showcase Portland's unparalleled beauty. We offer driving and walking tours. Please inquire about our walking tours in DT, old-town and/or Pearl District.
See, get out & look around:

Dt/Old-town Portland with about 45-75+ sights

Possible Stops: (custom stops on request)

Pittock Mansion & one of the most spectacular vistas in Portland! (pictured right)
The Chinese Garden (1 DT city block)
The beautiful Portland Japanese Garden; "King of American Japanese Gardens; the most authentic outside of Japan" (6 gardens on 12 acres; if time allows) - (pictures at right)
Portland's world-famous International Rose Test Garden: the oldest official, continuously operated public rose test garden in the U.S. (Seasonal) - (pictured right)
Mt. Tabor - Portland's ancient cinder cone volcanic caldera!

Docent-guided 1 hour tour times (self-guided tours are also available):

International Rose Test Garden (1pm)
Pittock Mansion (11:30, 12:45 & 2pm)
Chinese Garden (11, 12, 1 & 2pm)
Japanese Gardens (2 & 4pm)

Learn About:

The history of this wild west port town-characters including 'Shanghaiiers' Joseph 'Bunco' Kelly and Larry Sullivan and James Lappeus, Portland's corrupt 1st Police Chief who resided over Portland's 1st murder, 1st public hanging and 1st corruption scandal in the 1870s.
The "Portland Floods" which engulfed Portland in 400 ft of water (depicted below right*) was the result of the Missoula Floods (depicted below middle) in the geologic period and produced the world's biggest floodwaters and waterfall, Dry Falls (not on your tour today, pictured below bottom), 5 times wider (3.5 mi.) than Niagara with ten times the flow of all the current rivers in the world combined!*

Plus:

Eateries - (Portland: A bustling & thriving food scene--One of the best places to dine & drink in the country; experience the city's acclaimed food scene)
Gourmet Coffee

And many options including a river cruise before, during or after your tour.

City Tour Details & Options

* This painting (below w/border) gives a hint of the awesome forces and volume of the biggest floods on earth, known as the Ice Age Floods. It shows the first rush of a Missoula Flood coming into the lower Columbia R. Gorge. The speed of the floods approached 60 mph through the Gorge topping out at about 80mph at the Crown Point constriction (depicted top-right foreground) and was 600 ft deep. At maximum flow, the largest of the floods filled the Gorge and covered Portland with 400 ft of water, then drained within 48 hours! The floodwaters, graphically depicted (right), would have nearly covered some of the tallest buildings in DT Portland at the time of the great floods. This event happened numerous times, perhaps up to 60 times over a period of perhaps 1000 years.
Dry Falls (below-bottom; NOT on your tour today) - This catastrophic flooding channeled water at 65 mph through the Upper Grand Coulee and over the 400 ft rock face of Dry Falls, through the Columbia R. Gorge and over Portland at the end of the last ice age. Dry Falls (the biggest falls on the planet) was 5 times the width of Niagara and the flow over the falls and through the Gorge was 10Xs the combined flow of ALL the rivers of the world.

Dry Falls Photo by © Steven Pavlov / http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Senapa, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16059590