Month: July 2009

Back across the state time, so yet another early morning.  And, of course, once again we’re not exactly taking the direct route.  We had two main stops planned for this trip across the state.  First, we headed up to the Grand Coulee Dam.  Apparently the biggest dam in the country, although even after looking at it, I’m not overly convinced of it.  Looked into their tours, but turns out their elevator was broken, so all people were getting was a brief trip basically out to a viewpoint it seemed.  Since we had just missed a tour by 5 minutes, and had to wait till the next hour to take one, didn’t particularly seem worth the effort.

From there, we headed down to the Dry Falls area (which apparently is in Sun Lakes State Park).  This is an area that was apparently carved out by a giant flood a long time ago, leaving bare cliffs where water used to flow over.  Visited the overlook at the top of the cliffs where the visitor center is, then headed down into the area.  Did think it was a little odd that they made the visitors center white.  From down below, it kinda stuck out pretty badly.

From there we followed 2 across the rest of the way, which seems to be a fairly scenic route.  Got into Seattle to once again hit the rush hour traffic, although again we seemed to mainly be moving against the main flow, so wasn’t too bad.  Checked into the Grand Hyatt, then walked down to the Pike Street Market.  However, at this point apparently everything was pretty much shut down.  So after wandering for a bit, then catching dinner, headed back to the hotel for the evening.

Spent the day wandering around with Cathy’s aunt and uncle.  In the morning, went out with Cathy’s aunt and introduced her to geocaching while wandering around the WSU campus.  Found a couple, skipped a couple others that were in areas I was less sure about.  Stopped by the bear research area and saw the couple of bears that were out.  Also stopped by Ferdinands, WSU’s version of their dairy store.  As usual for a college dairy store, their ice cream was pretty decent.

In the afternoon, headed out to the Snake River.  Crossed the Lower Granite Dam, where they seem to be somewhat on the overkill side of security.  ID required for everyone in the vehicle, no pictures while on the dam (yet you can take them from just below the dam).  Visited the visitor center and watched the fish swim through the fish ladder.  Apparently we were between salmon runs, so there really weren’t many salmon visible, only saw a couple.  Lot of carp in the river, which did kinda surprise me, always thought of them as lake fish.  What was also kinda amusing is that the young salmon going downriver are actually filtered out of the water with some big fish filtering plant, and then actually put on boat and taken downstream by boat.  Apparently at one point they used to actually truck them downstream.  Just seems kinda bizzare.  Then we went a little further downstream to a dunes area that you can actually get out and swim in the river.  Well, you can swim in it if you manage to get far enough out in the water.  At about 50 or 60 feet out, I was still only knee deep, although in about another 25 or so it did start to get deeper faster.  Water felt pretty cool considering it was about 95 degrees or so, walking back over the dunes not so cool.

Long day on the agenda today.  We headed south out of Seattle (glad we weren’t heading north, traffic looked pretty bad), aiming for Mt Ranier National Park.  As we’re headed down one of the roads towards the park, we pull off at a viewpoint that had a view down a valley, thinking the view looked kinda decent.  Someone else was at that view point, and he pointed out that you could see a bald eagle nest that had a fledgling bald eagle in it.  Cathy found him pretty quick with the binoculors, but as I’m searching, all I can find is what looks like an adult not sitting in a nest at all.  Turns out, while they were standing about 5 feet left of me, they could see the nest and not the adult, while I could see the adult and not the nest.  Sure enough, once I could see the nest, there was indeed an imature bald eagle in it, occasionally flapping its wings.

Continued on towards the park, but as we got closer, we starting seeing signs that part of the park road was closed on the east side, so you couldn’t connect to 123.  That was a bad sign, since we had planned on going through that way, since our ultimate destination was the east side of the state.  Driving through the park we made several stops at places where we could see the mountain or some of the waterfalls.  Kind of would have liked to do the hike to Comet falls, but we really didn’t have the time it would have taken, plus, the record high heat that has been plaguing the northwest was also affecting this area.  Heck, even the walk down to where you could see Narada falls was pretty tough (it’s a steep walk).

Visited the new visitor center in Paradise.  Nice place, but the whole area seemed to be having some issues, which meant they had not running water, so all the rest rooms in the area were out of service.  Great view of the mountain from here, but the clouds were starting to build up a little bit near the peak.  Ended up following the road all the way to the point where it was closed to check out the bridge over this deep gorge the stream had carved out.  Then we had to completely back track our way out of the park, and take a different road that runs a little further south than the park road.

From there, it was largely a lot of driving.  Turns out that the middle of Washington is a lot of farmland.  Fair variety of crops, I know we saw hops, apples, grapes, wheat and cherries.  The hops took a little bit to identify, but then I remembered an episode of Dirty Jobs that I watched where Mike was helping to harvest hops, and it was setup exactly the same.

Ended up skipping Palouse Falls, which had been on our plans, because we were running later than we planned.  Got into Pullman around 7:30 (about 12 hours after we started), just in time to pick Cathy’s aunt up to head over to Moscow, Idaho.  Cathy’s uncle was performing with his group at an alehouse there with open mic night at 8pm, we got there about 7:50.

Hopped on the plane after sitting all day in Detroit waiting for Cathy to finish a workshop. Boring flight,  too many clouds to see anything pretty much the entire flight.  After arriving, took some effort to locate the National car pickup point (does help to actually look at the sign telling you what floor you’re on).  They had a Cadillac CTS available, which I have to admit I had some interest in trying out, but when we stuck our heads in, the thing smelled badly of smoke.  Ended up with a DTS, which wouldn’t have been my first choice, but over the time we drove it, I have to admit, it handled a lot better than I expected.  Got into our hotel room to discover that while Seattle was having record high heat, the room’s AC was off and the window open.  Took a while for it to get cool enough to get to sleep.