13 September 2008
Despite the weather forecast, and a sense of impending doom, we chose to hold with our plans to attend Grapefest. This little wine festival plays host to the Texas People’s Choice Wine Awards and we go each September and have a great time. Afraid the storm might put an early end to outdoor events, we bought our tickets for the 11 a.m. tasting, and aimed to get to the festival pretty much as it was opening.
It was lightly raining even as we left the house, but we were armed with umbrellas and boots and rain jackets and hats, and off we went! We parked close to the main gate, and were immediately struck with how terribly few people there were. Then, we realized, there weren’t really many vendors, either! We can totally make our own fun, no matter what, so we weren’t really too bothered by it . . . just sad. After all, if we’d been at a tent show in the path of a tropical storm, we’d have packed up and gone home, too. Hopefully, Thursday night and Friday were good for those folks, and the weekend wasn’t a total wash.
The People’s Choice Tastings were happening, rain or shine, and we had a great time. As planned, we met Starr and Joe and Troy and Alex, and Rod, just in time to get to our tasting on time. With the weather-shy folks staying home, and the resulting crowd so small, we had plenty of time to taste as many wines as we really could–no standing in lines. We liked that part!
My photo is of our little group (minus Troy who was off visiting with a girl!) as we walked down the street after the tasting. A couple of other cute photos include one of Joe and Alex, and one of Rod and Kyle.
The wind and rain were a constant part of the day, but it never got bad enough to chase us away. We did go inside for burgers at Wilhoite’s, but that was mostly because there were no street vendors selling much of anything! Instead of shopping craft booths–again there really weren’t but two or three—we shopped the little stores on Main Street and just enjoyed each other’s company. When the walking had gotten the best of most of us, we decided it was time for an early dinner at Esparza’s, a fun little Tex Mex place we try to go to most years. It was still daylight when we finally said goodbye and walked to our vehicles. That was unusual, but we were tired and happy—just like we ought to be at the end of a festival day!
I took this photo of the beautiful hurricane-generated clouds on the way home.
We heard from a few folks down Houston way, that had come through Hurricane Ike relatively unscathed. We will continue to check in with other folks tomorrow. News coverage is still rather uninformative regarding Galveston—people aren’t really back there, yet. We are hopeful, in that it seems the storm wasn’t as bad as we’d feared it would be.
~MB
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