Cool little stop. There's a food truck selling treats, and some restrooms. There's also shops open around the monument where I picked up some postcards and a shot glass. Fun stop, but it is really hot out there in the middle of the desert, and there's lots of people waiting around to take the pictures on the exact same spot. Still worth the stop!
I couldn't find this! The address listed is not correct. Regardless, I stopped at one of the scenic views from the side of the bridge over the Snake River and it was beautiful.
We booked our room on Priceline's name your price thing, and ended up in a smoking room even though we're not smokers (I didn't even know hotels still had smoking rooms). I was surprised the room smelled as good as it did. You can't even tell it's a smoking room. The bed is comfy, the front desk guy was friendly, but it would definitely use some updating. You can tell it's an older hotel, but it was decent for the price. And even though it's a bit outside of downtown Portland, the drive isn't bad and the hotel is easy to find.
--edit--
On our last night, the toilet overflowed for literally no reason. It FILLED our entire bathroom and leaked out into the room and soaked the carpet. The staff went and got some sort of industrial wet-vac and sucked some of the water out of the carpet. Oh, and I had to hold the door open for them for the 30 minutes they spent trying to dry it. They then placed a small oscillating fan in the middle of the bathroom door pointed towards the carpet to dry it. I was told I had to call the front desk to ask to be moved to another room. When I called, the lady working the desk was very short and told me they were all booked and would have to move some stuff around and she would call me back. About 30 minutes later, the guy who had been vacuuming our carpet let himself into our room without knocking and was surprised to see that we hadn't been moved to another room. He walked to the front desk and got us a new room in like 3 minutes. The lady at the front desk never bothered to call back.
The next morning, we checked out about 4:30am, and the lady working the front desk was the most unprofessional person I've ever come across. She repeatedly kept saying how she didn't know what was going on, she was so overwhelmed, and at one point even said "No one ask me for anything else right now." It took me about 25 minutes to check out.
It's a real shame this is the way this experience ended, because even though the other nights were fine I will never stay here again based strictly on how my trip ended. So much for getting a decent night's sleep before I drove from Portland back to East Texas.
Really quick stop right on the way back to the Interstate and directly down the street from the Bronze Dinosaur Statue. Cool for a panoramic picture.
Quick stop, easy to find. We love dinosaurs so it was a fun photo op that wasn't too far off the Interstate.