Home Again

We arrived home around 1:00 this afternoon.  We spent last night in Pendleton, OR, and it is a surprisingly quick trip home from there.  It is all interstate driving, and despite terrible weather, we made good time.  It was a wonderful trip...the best kind of traveling, in my humble opinion.  We had a general route in mind, but otherwise, no plans or reservations anywhere.  This is the route we took, and we drove a total of 1,064 miles.

Once we got past Walla Walla, we started seeing the characteristic undulating landscape of The Palouse.  Mike and I agreed that it is a landscape best seen from a moving car because as we passed by, it was as if the hills were in motion.  Still images really do not capture its vastness.  The wheat is about a foot tall at this point and everything is incredibly green.

There are wind farms in abundance dotting the landscape.

They are all the big 200 foot towers that turn relatively slowly, but generate a lot of power.  It's a very good place for wind energy.

Recall that when we visited The Palouse region last fall, it was just after the harvest and it looked like this:

Quite a contrast with the greens, purples, and tans we saw this time.

There are picturesque farms spread far and wide from one another.  

It's a very different lifestyle from the one we are accustomed to.  These folks live hours away from the largest cities.  The largest of them, Spokane, is small in comparison to Portland, and so it is as if progress has passed the area by.  Of course, there is much progress in the ways the land is managed, but there are no skyscrapers, and the buildings are from a different era.  Here is a typical site from Colfax, WA, where we spent our first night.

We had dinner at a restaurant next door to the Barktique dog grooming salon.  I knew you dog lovers would get a kick out of this place.

The next day we headed north from Colfax toward Spokane.  We stopped off first at Steptoe Butte where you can get above the landscape and really see it.  This image looks south.

In this next image, I zoomed in a little bit so that you could see the town of Colfax.

This next image looks west.

And the next one looks north toward Spokane.  The sky couldn't have been prettier with its puffy white clouds, and the shadows they cast made the landscape even more interesting.

From there, we drove north to Spokane.  I'll tell you more about Spokane in a separate post, and I have three quilt shops to tell you about.  For now, I'm going to stop.  But I wanted to show you the sign from the Wheatland Inn where we stayed the first night.  I loved this verse from John 4:35.

I'll tell you more tomorrow.  For now, there is unpacking to do, and we need to go over to Matthew's house so that I can pick up my car.  I hope you all enjoyed your Memorial Day weekend.