Four Part Harmony

This weekend was one of good and bad.
First, to quickly dispense with the bad…
Our hard drive died on us again, and I spent much of Saturday dealing with that mess.
We’re back up and running though, so I think that’s all that needs to be said about that.

I did manage to get out twice to play music, both Friday and Saturday.
Nicki managed to get a pretty good quantity of tomatoes into jars and frozen on Saturday. Aren’t they a beautiful sight?

Sunday was the really fun day that made the weekend though.
Gabe and Maya invited us along on a wine tasting excursion down the valley.
We drove down Sunday morning (along with some other friends), and met Gabe’s mom and dad and a friend of theirs for a great brunch at the Eola Hills Winery.

After brunch we went outside and met Ken, our limo driver for the day (I always wanted to say that). Yeah, we were riding the back roads of Polk and Yamhill County in style. Nicki said she hadn’t ridden in a limousine before, and I couldn’t really remember if I had or not (I’m guessing not then).

There were ten of us total, and we had a blast driving around. We of course made a few stops along the way and sampled some great wines. The grapes were heavy on the vines everywhere we went, and it sounded like the harvest should be happening soon.

Maya took this really nice picture of Nicki and I at the second stop.

Our last stop of the day was at a brand new, up and coming winery located in Amity, Oregon. I had to take this picture just because I get the feeling it’s not every day a limo rolls through downtown Amity.
We met the couple who had started the winery, and they gave us a nice tour of their place.
They walked us through their entire production process and answered a lot of our questions, as we tasted a selection of their wines.
They even gave us a barrel tasting of a couple of their 2005 wines, which was highly enjoyable.

We were much later getting back to Portland than we had anticipated, and we were feeling bad for Tricia who had watched Anna for us all day.
Still, we got back home and Anna was as happy as could be…I think she had a lot of fun with Tricia, and by all accounts she was on her best behavior.

All in all a really fun day.
Monday morning came a bit too soon but it has a way of doing that anyway…