As we explored southwestern Washington, we made a quick dip into Oregon to go the Powells City of Books.  Powells bills itself as the largest bookstore in the galaxy and it may well be.  It covers an entire city block and has four stories filled with over a million new and used books.

Tom has been getting Powells emails for years and he really wanted to see it in person.  Of course Val, Johnny, and I agreed to go.  Who doesn’t love a huge bookstore?  We parked a couple of blocks from the store and walked eagerly to it.

We entered Powells through a huge lobby with a line of cash registers, waiting benches, and several information booths.  I picked up a map and Tom and I headed to the top floor.  Val went to the children’s section and Johnny departed for parts unknown.  We all agreed on a meeting time – otherwise we might never have seen each other again!

Tom and I tried to stay together but it proved impossible.  We spend too much time in unrelated sections.  I looked at knitting books for a while.  Then I browsed through travel, baking, Americana, and humor.  Tom likes to spend time in math and science sections for some reason.  After two hours I picked up three books but hadn’t even reached the fiction section yet.  Of course, fiction books are the easiest to borrow via e-books on the iPad.

We try to keep book buying to an absolute minimum but we ended up spending about $100 on hard to find books.  We met up with Val and Johnny at the agreed upon time.  Val had a bag of books and never made it out of the children’s books.  She and Johnny have 10 grandchildren, so that’s understandable.  In order to miss rush hour traffic we had a cookie and something to drink in the Powells café.

Powells City of Books was a great place to spend a few hours.  We didn’t spend much time in Portland, but we certainly hit a highlight!