![Toronto, Canada [dailyblender.com]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/toronto13-330x220.jpg)
It was tough to sleep on the red-eye from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Toronto, Ontario. When I initially booked my tickets from Portland, Oregon, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the cheapest route put me through Canada, which I certainly didn’t mind. A short jump to Vancouver, a red-eye flight, and a day to play in Toronto before I boarded for Brazil.
![Boise and Snake River Valley [dailyblender.com]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/grapes-e1550563835930-330x220.jpg)
Aside from your relationship with potatoes, you hadn’t really crossed my mind over the years, your state little more than a hostage to the French fry existence. As it turns out, there’s more to you, with over 180 agricultural products, a top producer of Austrian winter peas, trout, barley, sugarbeets – and yes, potatoes. You also have a serious relationship with wine. Who knew?
![Frichette Winery [DAILYBLENDER.COM]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/tricities2-330x220.jpg)
My knowledge of the Tri-Cities area had been somewhere between the Hanford Site and the Kennewick Man over the last fifteen years of my Northwest residence. It seemed a flat, uninteresting corridor in the lower middle of Washington state with nothing but space to offer, overshadowed by the evergreen of Seattle further west.
There wasn’t much English being tossed around on my flight from Canada to Brazil. Throughout the nearly-eleven-hour trip, I heard Portuguese, Spanish, French, German – but very few words I understood.
Simon Van Booy has a way with words. A way with people, really. An observation of life that builds on a page like the slow, calculated movements of new building constructs.
I hadn’t seen the Southern Cross in nearly twenty years. Back then, I was a junior in college, studying abroad for a semester along the southern coast of Australia, thousands of miles away from family and friends.
![Agritopia's Joe Johnston [dailyblender.com]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/joesq-330x220.jpg)
Developed in the early 2000s, after a string of successful coffee shops made Joe Johnston a local celebrity of sorts, it is an oasis in the desert, an agricultural Utopia. A working farmland sits at the heart of the property, with Joe’s Farm Grill, a small Farmer’s Market, and a coffee shop (packed with yoga Moms and strollers at 11 am) perched on one side.
![Tucson, Arizona [DAILYBLENDER.COM]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ariz_sq-e1544907436562-330x220.jpg)
There is something magical to the end of a year. It’s as if we’re given the opportunity for a do-over, to do away with another twelve months that may or may not have served its purpose.
As a Midwest kid who grew up in a faith-heavy community, it almost felt a little sacrilege to read Christopher Moore’s Lamb. The story of Jesus’s teen years as told by his best friend, Biff, Lamb spins the story of the Messiah’s early life, before the healing and the leading and the fishes and the whatnot.
The truth is that Jeffrey Morgenthaler is a cocktail crusader of sorts, in the same footsteps as folks like Daniel Shoemaker of Teardrop Lounge and Lucy Brennan of Mint/820. Bartenders who have put Portland on the map of drinking destinations.
San Francisco chef Richie Nakano is as widely known for his opinions as he is for his ramen. An online biography describes the cocksure chef as “the expert of kitchen trash talk”, his regularly updated Twitter feed peppered with sideswipes at everything from local regulations to “Best Of” lists.