Seven weeks on the road
I'm going to try and upload some photos from this day and last night. Hopefully it'll work.
Leah and Brianna with Bozo at dinner
We spent our evening in the Portland area with our friend Leah and her daughter. We had dinner at Abella in Wilsonville.
It took us 2 hours to get the 30 miles because it was raining for the first time in days. Portland's traffic is worse than Seattle's. Our Garmin tried to take us off the interstates onto local arterials but the same group of bicycle jihadists that are destroying the carrying capacity of Seattle's streets had been here earlier. We went from a line at one stop light into another. 4 lane streets are now 2 lane with huge center left turn lanes (1.5 lanes wide) and bike lanes on each side. Cars drive 4-5 blocks in the center lane to make a left at the light a 1/4 mile ahead. No bikes along any part of the 10-12 mile stretch we were on.
The next morning we headed east up the Columbia and got on to the north shore, away from the interstate, and drove the Washington side to go to our favorite vintners and vineyards. I'll take the Washington side from now on if I'm in this area.
Our route took us over the Chain of Gods bridge. It cost $2, not much when you consider leaving the traffic behind. We were headed for Benton City to pick up our spring release of wines. On the way we stopped at Alexandria Nicole's Destiny Ridge winery for a tasting. It's only a mile off the highway so we could not not stop. We had a nice conversation with Ryan and Stephanie and ate our lunch after doing the tasting. We've got our release waiting for us in Woodinville.
After ANC we headed up through the Horse Heaven Hills, a beautiful plateau between the Columbia and Yakima rivers, and drove down into Benton City to Sleeping Dog. Larry does wines in an Italian style, a little less alcohol helps the flavor come through.
Tonight we're headed to J Bookwalter's winery and restaurant. The wines and food are good, a bit pricey but worth it.
Tomorrow we head north towards home. We'll make 2 stops. The first at Cultura in Zillah for our spring release there. Tad is another excellent vintner that we found a few years ago. Our process was to stop at the Yakima Visitors center, pull their list of wines and vineyards and look for places that are "heavy" in the reds we prefer. Both Larry and Tad are small producers and focus on red varietals and blends. Tad's tend to be "bigger" than Larry's, but then there are dinners that Tad's would overpower. His Kairos blend is probably the best we've had for a lamb dinner.