Wine tasting for Dad’s birthday

We took a trip to Temecula for some wine tasting. Color me surprised, I didn’t know there was wine in Temecula and I didn’t know it could be so good. We went to 3 different wineries and a wine and cheese pairing and had an altogether great day.

I’m not going to bother mentioning 2 of the wineries because although they were good, they lacked something. A personality, a soul, that je ne sais quoi…something. Longshadow Ranch, on the other hand, was fantastic. Mike served us up, gave good conversation, was entertaining and didn’t make us feel rushed in any way. Exactly what I want in a wine tasting. On top of that the wine was excellent too.

The Andes (in the window)

We’ve spent the day at Isla Damas and Humboldt Penguin preserve, smelling a pretty serious amount of bird crap on the way. It’s been -really- hazy and overcast which means I burnt the crap out of my face, too.

Hello from Pisco Elqui!

Pisco is the national drink of Chile (unless you’re talking to someone from Peru in which case there’s this whole controversy). It’s an alcohol distilled from grapes and put into a pisco sour which is served at pretty much every restaurant in the entire country. We’re touring the valley where they grow and manufacture pisco and seeing a couple plants. We’ve also been to fresh fruit stands, artisan fairs, museums, ice cream shops, parks and all kinds of various touristy bits of the elqui valley. We are at the final stop in a town called Pisco Elqui, the birthplace of pisco.

La Serena…exhausted

Vegas to LA, picked up the sibs, LA to Dallas, Dallas to Santiago, picked up Dad, Santiago to La Serena. That’s a lot of flights for one day. Now we’re at Jumbo (the supermarket) for supplies. We don’t have anything in the condo we’re staying in so we had to pick up some staples. We’re pretty much sleepwalking at this point but it’s a necessity. So sleeping in tomorrow.

The whole fam!

Dad is heading of to destabilize some foreign country or another so, keeping with tradition, we got the whole family together for dinner at the Outback before he leaves. The new addition this time would be cousin Desiree who, like Ma and Myya, doesn’t particularly want to be photographed so she’s here in person and in photographic spirit. We’ll just let the rest of them ham it up for the photo.

Back to Roadrunner after a long absence

I haven’t finished tagging all the old posts so I don’t know how long it’s been since we went to The Roadrunner but I do know it’s been a while. Possibly not since I got the iPhone because we well overlit this shot and I ended up with some really weird shadows on my face. The real story here is that I don’t think we’ve ever gotten service as bad as we did this night. It started out OK but went to crap -really- fast. Now I’m not unhappy we haven’t been here in so long. Luckily the good company made up for it.

The return of the Pop

Dad’s back in town after sowing discontent in and destabilizing the foreign relations of Venezuela. Not really, but my friends swear Dad works for the CIA since trouble is always following him around. he’s home for a bit and then he’s off to Chile and Bolivia…yeah, I know, but he seems to like it. These are 2 relatively stable countries, let’s see what Dad can do about that.