My first experiences with urban camping in Portland

So far, it's been a very interesting "mixed bag" of experiences trying to urban camp in downtown Portland. First, let me say that for all of the cities I could try and do this in, Portland is setup for it like an urban camping paradise. There are numerous parks to sleep in, and certain doorways seem to be acceptable sleeping places, although the idea of sleeping directly on the sidewalk seems silly in lieu of the fact that Washington Park is just a train ride away. At Washington Park, if you go far enough in, and it is indeed a large park, you will find many others who have zipped up into their sleeping bags and taken up a nice, quiet, and mostly peaceful plot of park to sleep in. My first several days in this town have been camping out with other rainbow brothers and sisters in the park. The weather has been very nice and temperate throughout the day, but it does get a bit chilly at night and I would recommend a sleeping bag rated to at least 30. It rains a bit in the spring and a lot through the fall and winter, but in the summer it's not anything you couldn't handle with a tarp, so I haven't need to pitch a tent yet.

The people in Portland are amazingly friendly and actually, quite a few of them are travelers from many other places. It is a port town, I guess. But, just about everywhere you go downtown you will see others with travelers packs, walking around, taking in the culture, being the culture.

There are so many free meal programs throughout the city that no one could possibly go hungry in this town. Going to them kind of makes me feel like I'm at Rainbow again, walking from kitchen to kitchen around the meadow. The biggest differences being that at rainbow I got fed wonderful, nutritious, vegan food that gave me much energy, even if I didn't eat very much, and Portland's free meal programs make me feel like I've been poisoned. Not to mention the fact that most of the free meal programs are visited by the mentally disabled or drug (heroin) addicts. Well, OK, so are rainbow kitchens, but at rainbow there's so much more love and consciousness present, and definitely no heroin, or most other powders. And alcohol is discouraged greatly.