Road trip - Day 5 Vancouver

Day 5 of our road trip was pretty chilled. We were driving from Portland to Vancouver. I'm not too sad about leaving Portland, didn't think downtown Portland has too much to offer, we did hear that the East part of Portland is nicer, but we didn't get a chance to drive across the river, guess it will be on our "visit list" for next trip.

On our way to Vancouver, we stopped by Seattle for a quick lunch at House of Hung, the food was ok, don't think I'll ever go back there again. We did stopped by Woodinville (north of Seattle, 10-15 miles away) for some wine tasting (yes, you can probably guess by now, we LOVE wine). Woodinville was really cool, there are more than 80 tastings room there now and they are all very close to each other. So if you didn't feel like driving all the way to Yakima Valley or Walla Walla Valley, Woodinville is a really nice option and has a lot to offer. We visited Lachinni, which is actually the only Oregon winery that has a tasting room up in Washington, we liked couple of their Pinots. William Church is another tasting room we visited, the wine was ok, we weren't blown away by it.

Our drive to Vancouver went pretty well, traffic was ok and it only took us about 10 minutes at the border. It was the traffic into downtown Vancouver that made us nearly missed our dinner reservation. I can't believe for a major city like Vancouver, there was no freeway that goes into the downtown area. My fiancee has this short cut he took to get to downtown but it really did kinda suck that at one point close to the airport area there was only 1 lane during rush hour...oh well...enough with my complaints.

We stayed at Aviawest when we were in Vancouver. It wasn't really a hotel but more like a time share and they rent the room out when there's no one staying there. The room was nice, it has 2 bedrooms and a living room, the office where you check-in has DVDs and some board games that you can check out.

Dinner reservation was at Lupo, one of the best restaurant I have ever been. We had been really excited about our reservation here and we had really high expectation. After dinner, overall, I'd say the food was good but the service was a bit disappointing. First of all, they told us we can't bring our own wine to the restaurant because of this BC code, I was kinda surprised coz we brought our wine to the restaurant when we visted back in April. Good that we found this Peppoli on their menu that we liked. Appetizers were great though. We ordered the Barrata to start with, the tomatos that were paired with the cheese were so fresh and refreshing that I can just keep on eating that for the whole night.

For our primi, we ordered 2 pasta dishes. I have been in the mood for pasta for a long time and was waiting for this dinner to quench my cravings. We ordered 2 pasta dishes, the pappardelle with slow cooked rabbit and ricotti gnocchi with veal cheeks. They were both fantastic but I had proven to myself that gnocchi is just not my thing even when it's really really good. For some reason, I don't find it very satisfying compared with the real pasta. For our secondi, we had the stuffed quail and special for the day: veal porterhouse steak. They were both good but I wouldn't say it's the best thing i have ever had. The veal porterhouse steak was overcooked (despite the fact that I told them I want it rare) so I sent it back, when the steak came out again, it was still cooked a bit too much to my liking, I guess it's probably just because it's a real delicate piece of meat so really easy to overcook, don't think I'll order that again when I see it on the menu.

Overall, the experience was still good. Lupo is still going to be on our list of restaurant to visit if we come to Vancouver again!