Tuesday: Not all that much happened. Wednesday: The family flew in to town, and didn’t get delayed or lose their luggage or anything dumb like that. This is always a good thing.

Then we had to get Stephanie and run out to Fountain Hills to visit a winery, because I’d bought a coupon that allowed 4 people to taste a bunch of wine and get one bottle of wine each. This had a few logistics problems. We could only use the coupon Wednesday, the winery was a long way away, and Mom and Dad were pretty tired. Also, we had to get dinner before going, and nobody knew where to go. I picked out a restaurant basically at random (“Señor Taco”, a little fast-Mexican joint) and it was actually much better than anyone had expected. Pretty cheap too. Sometimes, you get lucky.

The Casavino winery was pretty good too. There weren’t very many people there, we all got to taste 10 different kinds of wine, and we also got salty snacks and chocolate. The wines were a little hit-or-miss, but the sommelier explained a lot about each wine. We also got to taste ice wine, which Mom liked because she’d always wanted to try it and never been able to. So we picked out the wines we wanted, and had custom wine labels made, and that was interesting. Mom and Dad liked it, which was really what I wanted to have happen.

Thursday: We had a little more time, but Stephanie had to work. Went out to lunch with the parents, then after work, Stephanie took us all out to a pizza buffet. Then we spent some time at Bookman’s, which the parents really liked as the used bookstores they have are a whole lot smaller. Tomorrow: Zoo, probably.