Jackie's Blog

Our 14th wedding anniversary :) So instead of heading south to Ashland (an ironic name now!) we went east towards Crater Lake national park and hoped the smoke would not effect the views too much. A beautiful drive up there soon started to 'fog' over and the smell of burning grew stronger. The crater itself is quite spectacular and despite the smoke was quite amazing. It apparently is even bluer than Lake Tahoe under normal conditions. April 2015 Sorry, I had no idea I never finished this day - shame! From what I recall we ended up just staying in a small hotel and drove home the next day?

After a very active day yesterday we had a slower start and headed off to do our first wine tasting of this trip in Oregon. We started in st innocent winery about an hour north of Corvallis. This is apparently the area where pinot noir was first grown in the Willamette valley. The winery was very pretty. We were tasting 2011 and 2010 vintages which were wet and cool years here so not the rich fruit forward pinots  that I prefer but Dick was happy. We just went to one other winery- Cristom, and decided that even sharing a tasting that was enough that early in the day. We then came across the Willamette cheese company and so stopped in for a cheese tasting which was very nice after the wine. Ironically we ended up buying Oregon Gouda ! On our way back south I checked email only to discover that our planned visit to the Ashland Shakespeare festival to see A Midsummer's Night Dream for our anniversary treat (August 1st) was in jeopardy due to forest fires in southern Oregon that we k