Last Day of Freedom

I got a job!  Yay.  Woohoo.  Let's celebrate.

But...

I still have my weekend gig at the winery and the new job wants me to work a 45-hour week - not a simple 40-hour week.  So now I'll be working 55 hours / week and 7 days / week.  I'll be crazy busy.  I started my new job on Monday and I also worked yesterday, but I took today off to go to a chiropractor appointment.  The appointment was early in the morning and today is Eddie's Saturday, so we decided to take a little day trip and really enjoy my last day of freedom for a long time.

We stopped for gas on the eastern edge of Portland.  No particular reason for stopping there other than the fact that I needed gas, but it turned out to be a great stop because it put us right next to the Candy Basket chocolate & taffy factory.  They have this tall chocolate fountain to greet you when you enter and the experience gets better from there.  They had some chocolate mint truffles out to sample, but I was drawn to the different caramels on display.  We wound up getting plain caramels, milk chocolate covered caramels, and fluer de sel caramels.  And all of them were delicious.  Eddie picked out some taffy, but the flavors we got weren't the freshest.  I bet it's better in the summer when they probably make their batches more frequently.

Our next stop was also unplanned and surprisingly also involved a waterfall.  Our actual destination was Hood River, but we decided to follow the exit for Multnomah Falls.  Eddie and I went hiking very close to the falls last year - only we didn't realize we were so close to the falls so we never got to check it out.  It was nice to be there this time of year when there's plenty of water rushing down.

Back in the car and time for Hood River.  I did a little research and found two wineries that would be open on the weekday.  Our first stop was Cathedral Ridge Winery - the better of the two for the day.  It was nice to do some tasting outside of the Willamette Valley and try wines with some body.  The wines were also fairly reasonably priced so we picked up a few bottles to take home and enjoy later.

The next stop was the one I was really looking forward to.  I heard about Double Mountain Brewery on Yelp a few months ago and filed away their name knowing I'd have to go in to check out their beers and coal fired pizza.  I went in with high expectations since the reviews were so great and was pleasantly surprised when the brewery met and exceeded those expectations.  I've been in Portland for a year now and this is definitely my favorite brewery of all the ones I have tried up here.  The sampler set was crazy good - eleven 4-ounce pours of an amazing beer line up.  They even have some great Belgian brews in their lineup.  In fact they were so good that Eddie and I dished out the dough to purchase a growler to take some beer back with us.  Fortunately they only charge $5 for the growlers here - but the beer we filled it with was $18.  Still incredibly reasonable.  And yes, the pizza was awesome.  Some nice char on the crust and they use large, spicy pepperoni slices.  Eddie also loved his "Truffle Shuffle" pizza.

Since I didn't want to drive back home the same way we drove out to Hood River, I thought it would be fun to drive back home around Mt. Hood - even though it would add a good 30-60 minutes of driving time.  I don't think Eddie minded much though because I found another winery for us to try (Mt. Hood Winery).  Not the best wine I've ever had, but we found a few things we liked to take home.  There was a lot of snow piled up on the side of the road so Eddie and I stopped at one of the snow play areas and had a great snowball fight.  When I first met Eddie five years ago, he had never once seen snow.  This was the third time he's been to the snow.  It's so fun for me to watch him because he's like a little kid since snow is still novel to him.  And even though he's just a novice and I have more snow experience, he managed to kick my butt in our snowball fight.

We packed up after this and headed home.  Both of us were pretty wiped out from the day's adventures between the wine, beer, and snow.  I spent the rest of the night finishing my library book - The Battle for the Castle.  Does anyone remember reading The Castle in the Attic as a kid?  It was one of my favorite books in school so I checked it out from the library a few weeks ago for a very light read.  It was a lot of fun reading that so I picked up the sequel.  I don't think The Battle for the Castle has quite the same charm as the first book, but it is such a neat story.  Every kid should read these books.

Oh.  If you're wondering...  My new job is handling inventory and shipping orders for a local book publisher.  Kinda cool considering how much I like to read.  I'm just not really looking forward to working so hard and having no days off during the week.  We'll see how it goes...