Thorough look at the Pacific West Coast

Jen's note: I like to eat A LOT so I wasn't full. Food was more sweet rather than savory so that might have affected my opinion about the tour. Lots of good stories on the tour. Forgive my spelling but my favorite stops were Pirosky, Beecher's cheese (mac n cheese rocked), Daily Donuts. Beecher's mac and cheese was sooo good, we had a portion of the regular and the spicy for lunch - yummy. And then we had it AGAIN for lunch the next day.

Sadly, it was overrated. We were really looking forward to this meal but they just didn't have enough staff to cover the traffic. We arrive at 8:20 for a 8:30 reservation and didn't eat till 9:45. Staff was really nice but when you are coughing up $300 for a meal - food should not take SO long. I ate took much bread because I was starving. 1st dish was too cold, like just pulled out of the fridge when it should have at least been at room temperature. Scallops and risotto was delicious. I had to pass on the lamb because I was full on bread by the time my meal came. Can't even remember the dessert.

Mike's note: Very good. You can't beat a good waterfall. And not only did the area have 'Multnomah Falls', it also had lots of other falls. Each sort of looked like each other (water falling down a cliff, lots of moss), but they were impressive none the less.

One point to note if you read this is not to go to the Multnomah Falls if you like Carrot Cake. 'Why?' you might ask. Well, because there is something in the air that causes the brown sugar in carrot cake to clump together into lumps that makes the Carrot Cake taste awful. Jenny got some carrot cake from the restaurant and could only manage one mouthful, which is very unlike her. Normally, she eats carrot cake by the shovel load.

Mike's notes: This was our first wine tasting, and our first wine tasting. I have to admit that I wasn't too sure what to expect. Here were my impressions:

1) More expensive than I thought that it would be. We had two tasting flights (each consisting of five glasses) and some cheese and the total cost was $30. The entire thing lasted for about half an hour or so. Which basically means that it is a lot cheaper to go to a bar.

2) You actually need to know something about wine. On the red tasting flight, we tasted five pinor noirs all from the Willamette (sounds like damnit) valley. While there were potentially small differences between the wines, it was tough to tell to be honest.

3) You don't get food with the wine, which you need with some of the red wines.

4) Finally, some of the wines that they gave you really needed 'laying down' for a while (e.g. five years). So we were tasting the wines very early, and expected to work out what they would taste like at their best. Very difficult indeed!

Jen's note: The building, however, was very nice. Known for being an environmentally sustainable building, the tasting area had lots of big windows which shined a lot of light on its clean, modern, birch wood interior.