Brother comes to town day #1.

Monday November 21 my brother flew into town for a few days from Kansas City to spend the week of Thanksgiving with us. It was a vacation for him and it ended up being a mini-vacation for us, too. The day he got in, we headed over to Seattle to a coffee shop and to look around for a while. After our Seattle adventure, we headed to the Wilde Rover, an Irish bar in Kirkland, to watch Monday night football seeing as the Kansas City Chiefs (our home team!) were playing.

I learned a few things this first day: 1) I still suck at parallel parking and now my brother and an entire coffee shop in Seattle can testify to it. 2) The Chiefs new quarterback (Palko?) is very weird looking... and also? He is terrible.

The next morning I went into work for a few hours before my brother got up. Justin has Tuesday afternoons off of work so we decided to take him on the Woodinville wine tour that afternoon. There are SO many wineries in Woodinville that you could probably spend HOURS doing this. Luckily for us (and our livers) the wineries are only open from about 12-5 so you can't do too much damage.

Our first stop was the Chateau St. Michelle. They have beautiful grounds and for this reason I like to take people there. Their wine is ok, really, it's good for the price and most people have heard of this winery. This time, actually, I was pretty impressed with some of their wines and we ended up joining their wine club. Stop number one and we already joined a wine club? Evidence it MIGHT just be a long day ahead... After getting booted out of St. Michelle due to a fire alarm, we headed to the Delille Carriage house.

OH MY GOODNESS. I love Delille. I have never had a bad wine of theirs. We did the tasting where we got to have tastes of both a $140 bottle and a $170 bottle. The $140 bottle was ok, not great (especially for the price) but the $170 bottle? Oh my, I am in the wrong profession. It was SO GOOD.

My brother and Justin at Delille. Don't worry, Justin is not drunk, he's just a bad picture taker.

Ah, this one is much better.

Next stop? Mark Ryan. Also another great, fun winery.

I tried to get a shot of Justin and I... it was dismal at best. Partly due to the wine, partly due to the yucky old iphone and it's bad photos, partly due to the darkness outside because it was pouring rain all day. Oh well!

Next stop: next door to Mark Ryan was Amavi. I was not super impressed by this one. We hadn't been there before. It was decent but not great. We bought a bottle of white for Thanksgiving.

Another shot of Justin and Jon.

After making a final stop at Woodhouse Winery (where we belong to and where we got married), we headed home. It was time to call it a day. Of course, we had to take a picture of our loot... we definitely did some damage but it was well worth it. Notice the GIANT bottle in the back? If you're a faithful blog reader you know that we got the same bottle (different vintage year) last year for Justin's family's Christmas. It was fabulous and a great deal so I think this might just be a new holiday tradition. After a dinner of salmon, sweet potatoes and salad, we curled up on the couch and declared it was a very successful day.