Wine, Doughnuts and One Way Streets

That pretty much sums up my weekend. My wonderful friends Michelle and Kevin decided last week that they were going to drive up from Utah to see me for the weekend. That's right, an 11 hour drive each way for a weekend trip! Much to my surprise, when they arrived in Beaverton at 4:30 Saturday morning my amazing little, Sara, was with them! Needless to say, after they got here everyone went back to sleep. We then spent the rest of the day being tourists. After a very long detour, many u-turns and wondering how we drove right past it: we went to a local vineyard - Ponzi. We did a wine tasting and I actually found 2 wines that I liked! The first one we tasted was a 2007 Pinot Gris and it was lovely. Another we tried was the dessert wine - a 2006 Vino Gelato. Wow, is all I can say about it. We decided it would be great with vanilla ice cream and a peach. We had a lot of fun and it will be a must see when Jake is back in town.


After the tasting we headed to a local diner that we had stopped at earlier to ask for directions. It turned out that the place had only opened the day before. It was very mom and pop and the food was pretty good. We decided to head to downtown Portland and check out a few sights. We quickly discovered that downtown is full of one way streets and none of them seemed to be going the way that we needed them to. On the positive side, we went on a great little tour of Portland. Our first stop was Powell's Books. This place was totally overwhelming! The building took up a full block and it was 4 stories of every book you can imagine. A Pike, Brian, that Sara, Michelle and Kevin know is from Portland and was home for Spring Break so he met up with us there and played tour guide. We then headed to Voodoo Doughnuts for a sweet treat. It was a tiny store and there was a line out the door, but it was totally worth the wait. They do crazy things with doughnuts - adding cereal, Oreo's and even bacon on top! It was delicious. After a little more walking around we decided to head to Brian's house to just hang out. We had dinner and a few drinks and just enjoyed relaxing. We even found the stash of old toys that Brian and his sister used to play with and had a blast from the past with all the Barbies!


Sunday was spent at the Portland Saturday Market (Sunday's too). It is an open air craft market downtown that sells everything you can imagine. Getting to the market was yet another adventure including more u-turns and issues with one way streets while trying to find the light rail stop that actually had parking. We finally made it downtown and saw many interesting things both along the way and at the market. The doughnuts from the day before were so good that we decided to go back again because we were so close to the shop. A little more wandering around town, back on the train and we were home again. It was a low key night cause I had to work the next morning and they were driving back to Utah. So we walked to the Chinese restaurant up the street for dinner and watched a movie. Overall it was a very fun weekend.

I loved having visitors! Thanks for coming to see me guys!