In September of this year my mom and I traveled together again, this time to Newport, Ore. for a few days and then inland to wine country. What I wanted most from the trip was for it to be easy and relaxing. I didn't care about having a detailed itinerary or trying to cram a ton of fun into a few days. For the most part these goals were met, though one incident, which I will get to, did put a rather disturbing & eerie spin on the trip.
The Sylvia Beach Hotel
I'd been hearing about the Sylvia Beach Hotel for a few years as a pleasant place to stay and a book lover's heaven. A communal library, rooms named and decorated in honor of authors, no Internet, and no cell phones allowed. Mom and I stayed in the Steinbeck room, whose most prominent characteristic was a 3D mural of an old car coming out of the wall between the beds, its headlights acting as bedside lamps. There were jars of Doc's specimens on high shelves around the room (from Cannery Row) and plastic frogs in the bathroom.
At some point we toured the other rooms, which are open to viewing during the day as long as no one is staying in them. My favorites by far were the J. K. Rowling room done up in Harry Potter paraphernalia and the Colette room, which had a fireplace, a private deck, and sumptuous decor.
The Restaurants
One of the best things about the Sylvia Beach Hotel is that it is right across the street from one of our favorite restaurants, April's at Nye Beach. The photo on the right, I believe, is worth at least a thousand of my words, so I will leave it at that.
We also ate at a restaurant on the bay, which unfortunately did not ring my bell. The most interesting part of the meal there was meeting, in the wine bar upstairs before we were seated, a handsome man in his late 30's or early 40's who seemed very interested in meeting new people. In addition to being handsome, he was open, charming, a native Spanish speaker, and had led and interesting life. But it seemed to me that there was something not quite right about him. Maybe it's due to my overactive imagination, but I got creepy vibes off him and would not have been surprised to find out that he was a serial killer. I hope for his sake that I was ungenerous and mistaken.
Although our hotel included breakfast, Mom and I opted instead most days to walk to Cafe Stephanie, a little place nearby that proved to have good coffee and excellent quiche. I highly recommend this place.
The Backpack
And here we come to the disturbing incident to which I referred earlier.
On the second or third day in Newport, Mom and I took our customary long walk down the beach. At one point she saw a hotel towel in the waves and took it upon herself to rescue it. As she trudged inland to deposit it on a sand dune, I took the opportunity to survey the landscape.
That was when I saw the backpack. It was about half-way between the surf and the treeline. No one seemed to be near it, and there was no one playing in the waves for hundreds of feet. I thought it odd that someone would have simply walked away and forgotten it.
When Mom rejoined me, the wet towel now disposed of, I pointed the backpack out to her. After some discussion she trudged back out into the dunes to check it out. At this point I was merely curious, and I was content to let her do the hard work of navigating the dunes.
I watched her approach it, saw her pause as though trying to decide something, and then saw her move toward it with an air of determination. She picked up the backpack, then bent down and picked up something else and stuffed it into the backpack. And then again.
As I watched her do this, a family of three approached me. "Is it yours?" they asked, gesturing toward my mother and the backpack. "No," I said with some surprise. "I just saw it out there and my mom went to investigate." "We saw it earlier and looked," they said. "There is a phone there, and some money. It is strange."
Eventually Mom came back down from the dunes, backpack in hand, and told us what she had found. Several empty wine bottles. A few bottles of anti-psychotic meds. Discarded clothing. A cell phone that had likely been picked apart by the seagulls. A few dollars cash. A train ticket with the owner's name on it. But what pushed it from curiosity to concern for me was the Spanish homework. It led me to guess that the backpack belonged to a high school student, who perhaps had gotten high and drunk and had either wandered off or was passed out somewhere between the rolling dunes.
Mom and I went back out together but found no one. I did find a digital voice recorder and some socks, which I added to the backpack's contents. By this time it was clear to both of us that the police should be involved.
When a police officer finally did show up at the hotel, not terribly long after we'd called, my mom left our room to meet him and I followed shortly after. I found them just outside the hotel, rummaging through the backpack. We showed him the drugs and told him about the wine bottles. We showed him the homework and the train ticket. He found pot and a pipe in the bottom of the bag. I told him about the voice recorder, at which point he tensed and asked, "Did you listen to it?" I hadn't.
After he was satisfied that he'd seen everything, he filled us in. The backpack belonged to a man who had been found dead on the rocks just an hour earlier. Not a high school student but a college graduate. There were more details, but considering the police officer's demeanor and the ensuing lack of press about the incident, I don't feel it my place to divulge them.
Needless to say, this was a shocking and depressing discovery, and the after-effects stayed with us for a long while. For the next few days, every time I looked at my mom, all I could see was her marching up the beach toward the hotel with a dead man's backpack slung over her shoulder.
McMinnville
I hardly know how to segue from that to the rest of our trip, but the fact is that we did go on, albeit with a little more gravity.
We left Newport and drove to McMinnville, where we spent some time wandering around downtown in the growing dark before deciding to do a little wine tasting there. Unfortunately most of the shops were closed, but there was one that was open: NW Food and Gifts.
When we stumbled upon the place, they were just half an hour away from closing, but the owner was in the tasting room with a young couple who were vacationing together. She might have been from California; he was definitely from England. We were invited to join the impromptu tasting party, at no charge, and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half working our way through perhaps eight different wines, joking and laughing with the owner and the young couple.
NW Food and Gifts is another recommended destination, if for no other reason than the sincerity and generosity of the owner. The shop also features food and gifts that are all locally produced, and the art on the walls are by local artists. Support your local economy! =*)
Wine Tasting
We stayed in McMinnville that night and headed out to the vineyards around Dundee the next day. We visited Winter's Hill and De Ponte Cellars. We may or may not have visited a third winery, which may or may not have been Domaine Serene.
The tasting fee at De Ponte seemed a bit steep to me, but they let us split a flight, and a couple of their wines were extraordinary. Mom bought a bottle of one we both loved and is saving it for some unspecified time in the future when she I and can have it all to ourselves.
The tasting at Winter's Hill was just okay, but I went home with a bottle of their Golden Nectar ice wine that proved to be super delicious when I opened it for a friend's birthday dinner to go with the pineapple upside-down cake. I would absolutely buy that again, and of course (if I remember correctly) you can only buy it direct from the vineyard.
After all that wine I thought it prudent to eat something, so we drove into Dundee and happened upon the Ponzi wine bar, where we ate some meat and cheese and ordered another flight of wine.
The End
The ocean seen and much wine drunk, we headed back to Portland. (So much for a short post free of unnecessary details!)
