A Birthday Outing to Powell's Book Store

Now that my children are older, we celebrate their birthday's by letting them pick a location for a fun outing. My daughter celebrated her birthday earlier this month, and since she absolutely loves books, she decided her birthday outing would be a trip to Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland.

Sarah had been to Powell's before when they went on a tour of downtown Portland for a school field trip, I had only ever been to Powell's smaller locations. I had heard that this bookstore was huge, and we were all looking forward to spending the day exploring. When we arrived I was amazed at the size of this place, it is huge, there are so many rooms of books that we had to use a map, "City of Books" is right! I made sure that the kid's stuck together, and that they could text me what room they were currently in so we could find each other if needed, the rooms have color names, like the Rose Room, or Gold Room, which was very helpful.

The interesting thing about this bookstore, is that it not only sells new books, but also used books, so there are really great bargains on some gently used books, as well as plenty of new books to look through as well. I had fun browsing through some of the older books, and the kids had fun finding many books that were on their want lists, as well as books they hadn't seen before, they both bought a good supply to keep them busy for the rest of the summer. :)

The most interesting room there though had to be the Rare Book Room, what a treat that was! We were able to see some very old books, including books from clear back in the mid 1500's and 1600's, of course those were behind glass with price tags that were just as fascinating (rare books can be incredibly spendy!!). Some of the rare books could be looked through carefully, and we read a few excerpts from some interesting books from the early 1900's, as well as flipped through some old leaflets, and textbooks, and even some vintage coloring books. It was a wonderful treat since we are all book people.

We spent a few hours exploring and then headed to the checkout with a large stack of books. Such a fun place to explore!

I tend to get a little overwhelmed with that many choices, so I took pictures of the books I wanted to consider for later, and only bought two, one was a little Basher's Book for our collection that was on clearance for under $4.00 which I thought was a great find, and the other is a book called Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I, this book takes place in a magical place just on the outskirts of Portland. I was intrigued by this book because of it's local connection, as well as the fact that it takes place in a magical world with talking animals, not unlike Narnia, as well as being similar to books like The Series of Unfortunate Events and The Spiderwick Chronicles, which I really enjoyed reading with my kids when they were younger. I am about a third of the way through and am really enjoying it, the art work in the book is also very well done and really enjoyable. I already ordered the next two books in the series, and am looking forward to reading through this series throughout the summer.

We all had a wonderful time visiting Powell's City of Books, it is definitely a place I would enjoy visiting again. We spent the rest of Sarah's birthday celebration playing games together, and I made her an angel food birthday cake with some vanilla pudding cream and blueberries, topped with some very cute mustache candies that I found, overall a fun celebration. :) Happy Birthday Sarah!!