Wine country is open! We went on our first bike ride van camping trip last weekend - a great test drive of the new van setup with tow bar/bike rack and our first wine country trip to eastern Washington - and we picked a great weekend to do it with all the rain in Seattle. We left on Saturday morning with the aim of getting to Walla-Walla mid afternoon to start our first bike ride.
After getting groceries & wood, we got on the road around 3p. Our first ride ended up being around 15 miles and were planning on stopping at a couple of wineries on the way - but we spent a bit too long at the first winery and didn’t realize that the wineries all close up around 5p…
The first winery we stopped at was called Amavi cellars and the view was amazing. We did a wine tasting and got some cheese and crackers. The cheese and crackers was pretty good, the wine was not the best - still, couldn’t beat the view.
After the first winery, we had a long bike ride around the wine country loop. Angela got some great pictures of the country we were riding through.
So many wineries! Once we had rode about 5 miles out of town, there was a winery at least every quarter mile. This sign kinda says it all.
Sara had a great time in her little trailer - as long as we stopped every hour or so for her to get out and run around.
By the time we got to the next winery on our list (Dusted valley) it has just closed. They were willing to sell us a bottle to take with us - which was amazing with our dinner at the campsite. We got to the campsite after sunset, so not a lot of pictures from dinner. We cooked a lovely meal though - Fajitas with enchilada sauce and cheese and some very good wine that Angela purchased as a drive-by from a second winery (had already closed, but offered to sell us a bottle for the road).
The next morning, we made breakfast burritos which I think everyone thoroughly enjoyed after the long ride from the day before.
And we had a grilled pineapple desert - who says you can’t have desert after breakfast!
Angela got some great pictures of Sara running around in the campsite after breakfast.
There was a campfire ban in effect still - WA state parks move pretty slowly apparently, national forests have already lifted the ban after all the rain we got over the last 3-4 weeks. Sara wanted to have a fire, so we had a “campfire” before we left camp.
We drove about an hour out of camp up to the Richland/Pasco/Kennewick (tri-city) area to the Sacagawea heritage trail - a ~20 mile loop along the Columbia river near the fork of the snake river. It wasn’t planned, but we had been listening to a book on tape about the Lewis and Clark expedition and we just happened to be at the part where the expedition was returning up the Snake river on their way home when we arrived at the trail. It was a beautiful loop - we didn’t do the whole trail, so we will have to make a trip back there sometime soon to finish the rest of it.
Some pictures from along the trail.
Near the end of the trail, we stopped at our second winery of the trip - called Longship Cellars. Great wine and they had a fun space with lots of fall decorations - which both Angela and Sara thoroughly enjoyed.
Sara collected up some leaves and brought in fall by making some “leaf rain”.
We did a wine tasting and got a bottle of the “Ginger man” wine - which seemed like it would go well with a Thanksgiving dinner.
And that was it for our trip! We headed back to Seattle around 3p and waved goodbye to wine country - until next time!