Parents-Only Vacation: Day 3, Woodinville & Vancouver

Whoa! It’s Day 5 of the vacation and I’m a little behind on the recap.

Day 3, Woodinville, WA and Vancouver, BC

From my earlier post about Vancouver, BC, you can tell that Vancouver did not make the best impression on me. It was really due to a combination of things-dirty city, throngs of homeless people, crappy hotel & location, and a realization that Keith and I prefer being in parts of cities that don’t make us feel like we might step on a dirty syringe at any point. But, Day 3 wasn’t all bad. We started the day by heading out of Seattle to Woodinvile, WA, which is about 15 minutes north of Seattle. It’s a cute tiny little town, and it has nothing notable other than wineries and breweries. Keith at St. Michelle

We stopped at Château St. Michelle (We temporarily abandoned our stance against all large commercial operations, 'cause the tour and tasting was free. Yeah, we're that easy to win over). Since we got there relatively early, we got a private tour from Bob. Bob told us all about wine production in Washington and he let us sample some wines. St. Michelle is all over the place so you probably have seen it at the grocery stores. Decent wine, made better by knowing the history, in my opinion. And, Bob was also into cameras so he and Keith had a long and in-depth discussion about their SLR cameras while I sipped my syrah. Across the street was another maker of adult beverages-Red Hook Brewery. For a mere $1, we got a tour and a very healthy sampling round of all their beers. We were hitting the road after the tour, so we took it easy and sampled only a few brews. Good stuff, even for a non-beer drinker such as myself. See how I enjoyed? Trudi Sipping some Red Hook

The rest of the day was disappointing-we got to Vancouver, realized it’s dirty, took a long walk through what turned out to be the worst part (really a fine line between bad and good in this place) and walked past Gastown and through Chinatown. What a crappy Chinatown. Let’s just say that a few posters to the Yahoo TripAdvisor will be hearing from me regarding their rave reviews of the China Town and it’s “open air market”. If by open air market they meant a few long tables with vendors selling things from a dollar store, then sure, it’s a market. Blech. Today was also the worst day of missing the boys, and nothing makes you homesick more than missing your kids and not liking where you are. Thanks a lot, Vancouver. We did find an area of the city that has more young professionals than homeless, Yaletown. It’s clean and has lots of great restaurants and bars. We had excellent Thai food. Or, rather, I should say I had great Thai food. Keith was brave and ordered his food ‘hot’ (rather than playing it save with ‘medium’ or ‘mild’). Our tiny little Asian waitress questioned his choice twice, and gave him a knowing look, but Keith’s not one to shy away from a challenge, and insisted on ‘hot’. I won’t ruin Keith’s storytelling material, but I will say that he played with his food and sat and stared at me eating my meal (of perfect blend of flavor and spiciness) a good bit. That’s all that’s worth mentioning of that day. More about Day 4 soon!