Walla Walla Washington! Mark wanted to spend more than eight hours in the city because of the number of wineries in the area. When we got there, we discovered that the city’s directory of vineyards and wineries had 54 entries. We couldn’t see a large proportion of these, but we figured that we’d at least make a stab at it during our one full day in the area, the twelfth.
But first to look around the city—we got there fairly early, and walked about a bit, even stopping into an intown wine-tasting shop and ordering three bottles for ourselves. The city was surprisingly pleasing to the eye: clean, well maintained, with lots of fairly old buildings, just generally civilized in appearance. But empty! We saw few people on the streets, few cars driving by. We returned to our motel, cleaned up, and made a reservation at 26 brix Restaurant, which Mark had read about in both the LA Times and Sunset. Now, I don’t know about Mark, but I had a meal that made me sigh and moan with pleasure. If you just happen to be in Walla Walla, be sure to go there.
The sense that Walla mostly appealed to was taste, and as a result I took rather few pictures. I think Mark was taking a holiday from photography equally. The two below I took at an interesting winery:
The next day Friday, the twelfth, we went out to wineries seriously. One
we stopped at was
L’École No 41,
which had a nice selection of wines, and was located in a building on which,
if you look at the big image, you can easily see
the words “District No 41” above the doorway. Here,
I had to buy some wine for Michael and Mary Lubin: before he settled down
at PS 42 in Eltingville, Michael went to PS 6 in New Dorp and
PS 41 in Dongan Hills—or was it 41 in New Dorp and 6 in Dongan
Hills? No matter, he had gone to PS 41, so he had to have some wine
from here. Fortunately, we have already gotten a good report on the wine
from the Lubins.
The interior of the old school was well and interestingly restored, and
the staff on hand was perfectly willing to let us look about and take
pictures.
(Big image; small.)
Before long, we had tasted so many different red wines (always red!) that we could no longer make any sensible distinctions among them. We managed to buy wine for all the close wine-bibbing relatives, though. Then we went back to the motel for a nap. That night’s supper was at a wine bar in Walla Walla, pleasant, but no competition for the previous night’s. We sat outside till a wind storm came up that drove us indoors, and then we went back to our motel to prepare for our drive to Seattle the next day.
Previous day’s pictures; next day’s pictures
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