Wine Tour, Dew Tour

I'll be brief today, since I haven't been able to touch the bus since the last post. My sister and her family were visiting last week, and that put a small crimp in that work. I'll touch on some of the visit, and a little surprise at the Dew Tour.

San Diegans Strike
My sister, her husband and 2 kids visited last week, and just left on Sunday. We were able to keep each other entertained for 6 or 7 days. More importantly, though, my kids and her kids had an opportunity to really get to know each other again (its been a couple of years). The last time we saw them it was at their place in San Diego for 2 days after we blew our vacation energy at Disneyland. This time they visited us here in Oregon. We showed them the local lake-side swim park, and had the whole extended family in for a big day-long picnic / swim-fest. Good times. I had to work (new job = no vacation time), but my wife took them around to different attractions here ranging from Oaks Park Amusement Park to Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI).

Yamhill County
I've lived in Oregon since the early 1990's, but I've never done the "wine tour" bit through Yamhill County. I've complained about the traffic snarl in Dundee like all the rest of the non-locals trying to get to the Oregon Coast down US99, but I hadn't ever stopped in Dundee. My wife and I took my sister and her husband there this past Friday. I'm not a wine drinker, so I was the designated driver. My passengers enjoyed Pino from 3 different wineries, and purchased a few bottles along the way (they really liked DePonte). We overnighted at Hotel Oregon in McMinnville, enjoyed a night of music in their main-level bar, as well as whatever was pouring behind the bar.

Dew Tour
Saturday morning, we readied ourselves, enjoyed a breakfast at the Hotel and headed home. No sooner did we arrive home than I needed to truck the boys down to the Rose Garden for the annual stop of the Dew Tour. For skateboarders and BMX-bike enthusiasts, this event is pretty amazing. Beyond the large selection of tents swinging schwag (like Nike, Powerbar, and Mountain Dew), there are the large acts. In the middle of it all, though, is the Nerf Dart Tag Battledome. This was the destination we sought when we left home. My older son competed in the Nerf Tag Tournament during last year's Dew Tour and they lost by a split second to the eventual World Championship team. They were disappointed they didn't win the Regional, but the consolation prize was a set of Nerf guns for each of the team members. Not bad. Since they didn't even know the competition existed last year before they arrived at the event, they recovered quickly and took their prizes happily.

This year, they knew about the tournament, and collected a team. Unfortunately, the age bracket tops-out at 12years old, and many of my son's friends were not eligible. T said, "how about C?" The parents were concerned that if C made a mistake, the whole team would blame him, and he'd be crushed. Still, the other guys on the team thought C was a great addition, so they went ahead with him. They learned to really appreciate that decision, and called themselves the Beta Squad.

In Round 1, C captured the flag once and shot many of the other team with his gun. Meanwhile, he was only hit once. His brother, captured the flag multiple times and also hit the other team multiple times. In the end, the won the first round easily 37-15. The second round proved much harder than the first. The opposing team shot well and had good speed, but neither team captured the flag very much. In a mostly defensive battle, the Beta Squad won again, this time by 3, 26-23. This placed them into the finals against a team that had won using heavy defense and sharp-shooting. They were much larger boys, but they didn't move as fast as the hip-less Beta Squad. In a contest that wasn't close after the first minute, the Beta Squad won the finals going away with a final score of 31-13. As the final ticks spun off the clock, they started jumping up and down realizing that they had just won a trip to Las Vegas for the Dew Tour Finals - and a chance to be crowned National Champions.

That's all for today. I'm traveling for a while, so it'll be radio-silence.