Ian and Jacquie left this morning after spending the week with me and
my wife in the Seattle area. They were headed toward the Tri-Cities
(if you don't know what that means, dont worry about it; it's not
important enough to bother explaining) and then to Walla Walla,
Washington, in the eastern part of the state. After visiting some
wineries there they plan to travel down the Columbia River Gorge to
Portland, Oregon, then down through Oregon's wine country (the
Willamette River valley), and on to the Pacific coast. They will then
travel down the coast until they cut inland to Sonoma and Napa where
more wineries await them.

We all had a wonderful time together, ate a lot of good food (Ian and
Jacquie prepared a couple of quiches one night which were marvelous),
drank a lot of good wines (mostly Columbia Valley but also a couple of
German rieslings and even a Grüner Veltliner from Austria, a first for
me), and we all had a chance to meet some new and interesting people.
When you live in an area you often don't take advantage of things to
do there until someone visits from out of town, and this is what
happened with us. Ian and Jacquie proved to be the warm and gracious
people I had expected them to be and my wife and I hope to visit them
on their home turf sometime in the near future.

Vino