Moving to PDX: Paul, Jenny and Buckley too!: Adventures with Mother-in-Law

Look at me, getting all caught up on my blog! This will bring us all the way up to yesterday, can you believe it?! :)

Paul's mom, Joyce, came out for Labor Day weekend to visit. Same as my parents, this was her first trip to Portland, so we got to do the whole "tour of Portland" again. I think Paul and I could write a really great book, geared toward locals, about how to give their visitors a well-balanced taste of Portland in just a few days. Yeah, I'll have to work on that.

We had a night out on the town for Joyce's first night. Once we did a little walking around, we hit happy hour! We somehow managed to do Rogue Public House, Clyde Common, and Saucebox (which has the most ridiculously awesome cocktail menu)... all before hitting the Doug Fir for a concert. That's some serious happy hour-ing.

Then we went to see !!! (chk chk chk) at the Doug Fir, located at the Jupiter Hotel. Paul and I had stayed at the Jupiter before, but had not been to the concert venue. It is a very, very cool place to see a show. Pretty small and intimate, cool log-cabin type decor, and great acoustics. Here are a couple pics from that show. Unfortunately, my camera sort of sucked in that type of lighting, so none of them are super clear.

Saturday was spent walking, shopping, eating and drinking. We hit up the Saturday Market, Farmer's Market, and everything in between. By Sunday, we were ready for drinks again. :) We headed out to the Willamette Valley for some wine tasting, since of course, that is Portland's wine country. We only had time to visit Archery Summit and White Rose, but those are my two favorite anyway. White Rose has one of the coolest tasting rooms I've seen, but this time we were actually in the room where they make the wine for the tasting, which was pretty cool.

View from Archery Summit:

Absolutely gorgeous! We also joined the Archery Summit wine club while we were there, which I am super psyched about. The only commitment is that we have to purchase eight bottles in a year - we would do that anyway! We get invited to release parties, get free tastings, and lots of other perks. I have a feeling this won't be our only wine club membership.

On Monday we packed some things up and headed out to the Columbia River Gorge (with Buckley too!). The scenery is absolutely breathtaking out there. We decided to take the Oneonta Gorge Trail, which is about a 3.6 mile hike (1.8 miles out and back) to Triple Falls.

Paul and I had taken this hike before, so I didn't snap any photos of the actual Triple Falls. But, there is this really pretty area behind the falls where we decided to stop and eat lunch. Between the trees, grass, and moss everywhere, there are more shades of green than I think my camera can even process. This truly needs to be seen in person to get the full effect... but here's a pic anyway.

And just for cuteness sake (I wish I had my macro on for this one!):

We had a great lunch packed up which included fresh breads from Ken's Artisan Bakery, some Humboldt Fog cheese and Delice de Bourgogne cheese, New Zealand Jazz apples, kalamata olives, and some salami selections from Salumi (an awesome charcuterie in Seattle, that sells their meat in only one deli in PDX - which happens to only be a few blocks from us). And we ate it all off of a fallen tree.