Food and Wine Festival

Yesterday I finished my work by 2:00 so that Mike and I could go to DCA and do the Food and Wine Festival. We had such a lovely time at it last year, I was excited to do it again. Last year the festival itself was rather unremarkable, nearly unadvertised, and hidden within the park. But various restaurants throughout the park were selling tapas-style chef's creations, like grilled artichoke, beer-battered halibut, bruschetta, and strawberries in cream. They sold wine in taster-sized glasses to go with it. Mike and I went to every place and ordered every single thing on the menu. I guess sharing the tiny appetizers was romantic...I just loved it and was very glad to see the event return this year.

There were fewer selections this year. Six total, I think. Much better theming and advertising this time. Mike pointed out that they had corporate sponsorship this year. They offered various classes and wine tastings throughout the park, but you had to have reservations, so we didn't really participate. We kind of planned this trip by the seat of our pants, so we couldn't make reservations. But we were sitting near an area where someone was teaching about tequilas, and we listened and learned, if not tasted.

The park wasn't exactly crowded, of course, but a 40 minute wait for Tower of Terror kind of explains how it was more "crowded" than usual. So we went over to Disneyland because Mike said he had never been on the train. We went around one and a half times. He got a big kick out of the dinosaurs. And the fact that when we were at the New Orleans station and he heard Morse code and he asked me what it was saying, I actually knew.

They moved the Christmas store over to Frontierland. When I saw a Christmas tree in the window of a log cabin, I couldn't resist going in. They have some nice stuff this year, all separated by themes. Like, you could have a white wedding themed tree, or a red and green tree, or a princess tree, etc. And they had a section with a rustic theme. Oh, how it was hard not to buy every single thing. The cutest ornaments with rusty jingle bells and pinecones, red and black flannel stockings and tree skirt and advent calendar, and the like. But I refrained. I only bought a lantern tealight holder featuring pictures of Mickey and a Christmas tree. Mike and I enjoy candles and lanterns and actually use them. We already have red and black flannel stockings, and a small pre-decorated Christmas tree, so we don't use ornaments or a tree skirt anyway.

We were about done at that point, but traffic had looked horrible when we were headed to Anaheim, so we weren't in a hurry to start fighting it. We went to the movie theater in Downtown Disney and saw Next. We liked it a lot. Before the movie started Mike dragged me over to the pin trading area. There were some hard core pin traders there. One guy was very nice and invited us to look at his pins, which were all pinned in books like CD cases only for pins. Mike told him he was nuts for having $3000 worth of pins when he could use that money to take a Hawaiian vacation or something. The guy said that they were his wife's pins. Mike said she must have been collecting for a long time. The guy said no, she just started a few months ago.