Wine tour & Last week in Washington

It is very hard to believe that we have been here almost 4 months. The time sure does fly when you are having fun.
We have enjoyed watching the granddaughters grow and change. Watching Lindsay come out of her shell and how much she enjoys school.
Gracie changes almost every week. She has become so much more active. When we first arrived, she was always being held by someone. Now she wants to be on the floor and moving, she is so mobile.
We are going to miss all of our family here.

Last weekend, we went down to Portland to visit my son, Alex, and his girlfriend, Kristen.
She is a representative of a wine distributor and has connections with many wineries.
Fortunately, they live very close to the Willamette Valley and its many vintners. She arranged that we go on a 5 winery tasting extravaganza.
The 1st one was an ATV tour of the vineyard and all of its facilities by the manager of the winery.

Tour guide and wine tasting

As we rode around the vineyard, she would stop and we would taste one of the 5 wines that she had brought. She was very good and we learned a lot about the history of the Willamette valley and especially this particular winery.
We tried a dessert wine that they loosely refer to as 'ice wine'. Ice wine is actually produced after the grapes are allowed to freeze on the vines and then harvested.
The Willamette valley rarely if ever freezes, so they harvest the grapes then freeze them and proceed to make the wine.
Almost every one of the dessert wines that we tasted were excellent and ever so smooth.
No need for a desert after a good meal with these delectables.

Willamette Valley

There were no more tours, but 4 more wineries. The main wine produced here is Pinot Noir and all of the wineries that we visited were within a short distance of each other. It was very interesting to note the differences in the wines from the different vineyards as the were almost next to each other. The tour and tastings were free to us, and a 30% discount on the wines we chose to buy. Thank you, Kristen.

Neat rows of Pinot Noir grapes

We have slowly started to get the rig ready for the road. I have put away almost everything out side as it has started to rain here almost every day.
Brenda has started rearranging cabinets so we won't have any damage to goods in the cabinets. 
As you might expect, things get stored differently when you are sitting as opposed to when you are traveling.

We are off to Becky's this morning to do our last loads of laundry and do a little grocery shopping.
This will be our last time to spend time with Fred before we depart.
Sunday, Becky is celebrating Gracie's 1st birthday. With all of her friends from school, Fred's parents and us, there will be quite a crowd there.

We are meeting some friends from Michigan, Mike and Sally Ranger in Kingman, AZ. We were hoping to get to Michigan last spring, but with the fuel prices as they were, we didn't make the trip that far east. Maybe, next spring.

Beth is going to be very busy when we pass through Phoenix and she will arrive in Spring about the same day that we will, so we will see her there. It will be good to see her again.
We will park our rig at Val's house until we we leave for Lake Livingston State Park.
We understand that Mike and Barb will be visiting Val & Tony while we are there. So we will enjoy seeing and visiting with them.
My youngest brother, Chris, lives there with his wife Linda, so all of the siblings will be together again, what a joy.


Ta ta for now.