i'll just live on wine and water my vines

for memorial day weekend / brad's birthday, i decided to rent a car so we could tour some of the vineyards in the immediate area. first, a few things about renting a car - you can rent a compact for $40/day OR get a "memorial day weekend special" and get the car for $15/day - that means $45 for three days. guess what we did? and (perhaps more importantly) refuse to take their "upgrade" to an SUV from the compact car you wanted - that SUV is usually a piece-of-shit chevy trailblazer that costs $80 to fill with gas and then gets about 15 mpg. holy god. i'm glad i don't own a car or drive regularly or that the only time i do is when PISCO is paying for the petrol.

brad and i had a great time having a car. we basically did an "intro to the area" for the weekend. visited four vineyards on saturday - tasted lots of delicious wines, saw the beautiful countryside, joked with winemakers, and got to taste one pinto gris that was still in the ... cask (uh i have no clue what you would call the big metal container that the wine is kept in until it's "ready") and hadn't even been bottled yet. fabulous.



[benton-lane vineyards]


newport is the town straight east of here on the coast, so we drive through it all the time to get to sites during tidal series, but don't ever really stop there, so we decided to spend memorial day there wandering through shops and visiting the nearby lighthouse.

it's a pretty neat little town - cute galleries, cool bridge, and very vocal sea lions.







both brad and i commented on how touristy it is. it really surprises me how not touristy most of the coast is, and how local it still feels. no (ok, limited) million dollar homes, huge hotels, etc - i like that, for the most part, it is still very traditional. people just haven't discovered it yet. or maybe the bad weather keeps most of them away. :)

and we went out to the yaquina head lighthouse. it's on a gorgeous headland just north of newport and is really just stunningly beautiful. the rain and fog was really moving in, but we still got some good views of it.





so wonderful weekend, and i'm really happy that we got to see some more the area - it was nice to get out of corvallis for a bit. having a car certainly makes you feel less confined in an area.