With every new place, we make out a list of our “must sees” while we are there and this weekend, the sun finally came out, so we took full advantage and happily crossed a few items off our list!  One of our favorite “perfect day” activities is to do a little wine tasting.  So we headed down to the Williamette Valley in Oregon to enjoy some Fall color and hit a few vineyards.  You might remember we did a little wine tasting while we were in Southern California and while a day spent tasting wine is never a bad thing, we did find the SoCal style, with cavernous, crowded tasting rooms and glamorous, perfect people flitting about a bit off putting.  We like a quieter, cozy atmosphere, one where the winemaker himself might proudly take you on a tour of his vineyard, where staff take the time to chat and get to know you.  Maybe we’re a bit biased towards the NW, but there is just something about the wine country atmosphere up here that just feels more inviting.

So we spent a beautiful, cloudless day exploring the Oregon countryside and finished the day with a quick detour into Portland for dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant, Pok Pok.  I swear, Mr. F fantasizes about the Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings.  This is one place where, though the atmosphere is definitely NW cool, it is all about the food.  They could serve their yummies out of a brown paper bag on a street corner and we would still line up to eat it.

So many of our Sundays these days seem to be spent catching up and running errands, and we got a bit of that in, but took the afternoon to make the drive over to the coast, hoping to catch one of our former landlords at their coffee shop, Tinderbox Coffee Roasters in Westport.  Have you ever run across people who were just instant friends?  Tara & Nick, the owners of Tinderbox, rented their house to us a few years ago, my first time living in the Northwest and being away from Florida.  Friendly, warm, genuine people that we took an instant liking to.  The kind of people who get it.  And it shows in the coffee they brew and the atmosphere they’ve created at Tinderbox.  Unpretentious, cozy and full of life, just like them.  If you find yourself in Westport, or passing through Aberdeen/Hoquiam ( where they have a drive-thru stand ), make sure you stop and get a cup of java.  It will warm you inside and out.

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All images by Artsy or Mr. Forager. 😉