Les Kelloucq en voyage

Southern Oregon, under and above ground

We could not leave Oregon without visiting a couple of wineries. The Willamette Valley, the Columbia Valley and many other places have been producing excellent wines for a long time. Gwen’s husband being a huge wine aficionado, we all headed down to the Salem area to check out a couple places. At Saint Innocent, we were lucky enough to run into Mark Vlossak who started the winery in 1988. I like to taste wines, but I absolutely love the life stories behind the wineries. Vlossak was very talkative and we heard about his first experiences with wine as the son of a wine importer, the magazine article about sparkling wines that changed his life, his progressive reconversion from pediatrician to full-time winemaker and his take on the current craziness about Willamette Valley wines. We followed this lovely morning by a picnic lunch at another winery with a spectacular view of the valley with our band of four kids, four parents and two grandparents. Another scene of goodbyes and we were on the road.

The next few hours were not particularly fun. Driving I5 never is. The scenery is not bad, but it is a bit tedious and all the fun French homework in the world won’t change that. By late afternoon, we emerged in Grants Pass where my J-School friend Edith was expecting us. The cool thing about visiting a local journalist is that they know all the good plans and the great people stories (she had some crazy ones about how the Oregon National Guard is (mis)treating its forces at war and at home). It is also heartening to hear about a local daily that is doing okay, embracing the online revolution and who is giving local high school regular space in its pages to do their own reporting, a program Edith has been running for many years.

Time in Grants Pass was again the occasion for great outdoor feasts in Edith’s garden where EJ, the boys and I decided to sleep a couple more nights under the starry sky. We took walks along the Deschutes River to exercise her new dog Rocky (“It takes a village to walk a dog” became our new expression). We made a day trip to the Oregon Caves where Gabriel became a Junior Ranger for the third time this year and where we learned a lot about the “marble halls of Oregon”, the caves formed by acidic rainwater dripping on the underground marble. We visited “the Chateau”, the elegant woodsy lodge built on the premises in the 1930s to put up all the people traipsing up the mountain to visit the caves. We did not meet the ghost of the spurned bride who is said to haunt the place…

Like parolees on their last day of freedom, we crammed in as much as we could in our last hours of vacation on the road. We had a lively dinner at the Wild River Brewery featuring the beer of an amateur brewer chosen each season, we wandered around a real Wild West bric-à-brac, we hunted down locally produced goat cheese. We visited a local institution, a recurring art festival featuring bear art and this year Harley Davidsons. And then we had to go. EJ was due in California the next afternoon for his first meeting at a community college where he is teaching a class in a culinary program. More on that later. Boy, we love being on the road, visiting people and places, open to new discoveries. We feel so lucky to have seen everybody again. And my parents are the perfect travelling companions, always up for any adventure.

kelloucq le 02.09.10 à 19:20 dans Actualités -
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