A Week in Two Days

It's only been two days since I blogged, but it seems like longer. It feels as if a lot has happened. We're back from our trip to Yakima...or, Backima, if you will. When I left you, I was still quilting the Appalachian Memories quilt. When I headed up to the quilting machine Thursday morning, I looked out to see the first snow falling for the new winter season. 

And winter isn't even here yet. It was 34°F at the time, and it was coming down in fat wet flakes. At that temperature, nothing stuck, but it was a good reminder. It's almost time to get out of Dodge if we're going. And we are. We might get some snow over the next couple of days.

So it was time for me to commit my quilted wheat stocks to the outer border, and that went better than expected. As I've said before, sometimes I surprise myself. To do these, I quilted up the left side of the "stem," and then back down the right side. Then, I traveled back up the stem to either the right or the left of the top "grain," and then swooped off to make the next one. As I went, I had them leaning one direction or the other.

It was slow-going at first, but I was speeding along like a Formula 1 racer by the time I was finished. Lewis Hamilton has nothing on me. When it was all finished, I laid it out in front of the living room window for its picture.

Here's a more angled shot. I'm hoping you can see the texture a little better.

Here are a few close-up shots.

It might be a little easier to see the "wheat" from the quilt back.

And here's a less-zoomed in picture from the back. When I squared up the quilt for binding, I cut a good amount of that backing fabric from the edges, and that can be used again. Then, I noticed I have even more in the box with the Heartland Barns project. You can expect to see this fabric again. I'm glad because I really like it. It deserves a place on top of a quilt.

Okay, and then, it was squared up and the binding was sewn on. Then, I packed it up to take it along to Yakima with us.

Oh, but that's not all. I finished up the fourth of the Heartland Barns blocks Saturday morning before we hit the road.

Here are all the blocks I have for this quilt so far.

There is one more barn before I'll be ready to sew it together. The center panel is fairly large, but I probably won't get back to it before next spring. So that's a lot of slow-stitching. I'll be linking up to

Okay, but enough of this sewing stuff. It's time to get on the road. The weather could have been more cooperative. It's about an hour and a half to reach Hood River, Oregon, in the Columbia Gorge. The weather was wet, windy, and cold. Invariably, it clears up when we hit Hood River, and that was the case when we left on Friday.

Sadly, the weather was uncooperative on our return trip. I'd wanted to stop in Toppenish to see more of the murals. As it turns out, it was snowing in the mountains south of Yakima, and so we decided to drive east to Richland, Washington, before heading south and west toward home. Nevertheless, I did capture a few of the murals as we were heading north to Yakima. 

This one is the first one you see as you drive into town. In my internet wanderings, I was able to identify it (I think) as "Where the West Still Lives" stagecoach mural by Toppenish artist Val Kerby in 1994. 

This next one is some distance off the road with plenty of obstacles blocking my view. Still, I think you can get an idea about it. I believe I can identify it as "Fifteen Miles & a Change of Horses," designed by Phil Kooser and painted by 14 western artists from around the Pacific Northwest. The scene takes you back to the Toppenish Stagecoach Depot of the 1880’s. The depot burned down in 1928.

Finally, this one as we headed out of town. (It's a small town...don't blink.) I believe this one can be identified as "Fueling Up." This mural on the west wall of the school bus garage near the railroad

tracks shows school buses in a scene circa 1930 at the Four Way Filling Station. It was painted by artists Bill McCusker and Jack Fordyce.

Okay, and so I've told Mike I want to head back to this area on one of our short summer trips when the weather is better. There are so many more murals, and I'd love to spend more time here. You can read more about this project right here.

After that, we picked up the camper, had some lunch, and then parked at an RV park for the night. While we were there, I clipped the binding all the way around, and then started sewing. By the time I was finished, I'd turned the first corner.

We headed out early the next morning. As we headed east toward Richland, I noticed one of those brown highway signs, and it read "Teapot Dome Station National Historic Site." Huh? Wait...if you remember your American history, then you remember the Teapot Dome Scandal of the Harding administration. (And if you're an American and don't remember...well, you just weren't paying attention in history class, were you?) Politicians actually went to jail for crimes they committed in those days. Anyway...political griping aside...I got all wrapped up in thinking that whole thing happened in the state of Wyoming, not Washington. Which it did. And all of that to say I got so wrapped up in looking up history that we drove on past without realizing it was something completely different. 

As it turns out, it was referring to the Teapot Dome Service Station. It's an example of novelty architecture. It was intended as a reminder of the Teapot Dome Scandal (link above) that rocked the presidency of Warren G. Harding and sent Interior Secretary Albert Fall to prison for his role in leasing government oil reserves in, among other places, Teapot Dome, Wyoming. We'd driven past it ten miles by the time I realized my error, and we didn't want to drive back to see it. I found this image online.

(Image credit: By Iflorea - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62517547)

Wikipedia tells us that the station was built in 1922 on what later became U.S. Route 12. The building has a circular frame with a conical roof, sheet metal "handle", and a concrete "spout." Many such novelties were constructed as roadside attractions as the national highway system in the United States expanded during the 1920s and 1930s. The unique service station continued operation as a full-service gas station for some years. 

When Interstate 82 was constructed near Zillah in 1978 the station was relocated less than a mile down the Yakima Valley Highway. After the gas station was closed in 2006, it was purchased by the city the following year, rehabilitated, and relocated in 2012. It now serves as Zillah's visitors center. I'm so sorry we missed it, but maybe we'll get a chance if we make another trip back to the area. If not, I'm sure I'll go to my grave regretting this missed opportunity.

Okay, in other travel viewing. We saw some of the formations of the Channeled Scablands. 

The Channeled Scablands at one time were a relatively barren and soil-free region of interconnected relict and dry flood channels, coulees and cataracts eroded into Palouse loess and the typically flat-lying basalt flows that remain after cataclysmic floods within the southeastern part of  Washington. The Channeled Scablands were scoured by more than 40 cataclysmic floods during the Last Glacial Maximum and innumerable older cataclysmic floods over the last two million years. These floods were periodically unleashed whenever a large glacial lake broke through its ice dam and swept across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Plateau during the Pleistocene epoch. The last of the cataclysmic floods occurred between 18,200 and 14,000 years ago. 

At this point, we started heading into high winds that would bedevil us all the way home. If you look in the lower right-hand corner of the image above, you can see a tumbleweed blowing across the road. In the image below, you can see another one. Tumbleweeds are common in certain parts of the country, but not so much here, in the Pacific Northwest.

Wind gusts were hitting the front of the truck head-on with such ferocity, it shut off adaptive cruise control and activated the truck's collision avoidance functions. We pulled off the road a couple of times, turned everything off, and hoped we could reactivate the cruise control. Nothing doing. Every time another gust of wind hit, it all turned off again. Bummer. We hoped when we headed west toward Portland, we'd have the wind to our backs again. And so we were pretty happy to be crossing the bridge over the Columbia River and back to the Oregon side again.

We were disappointed, however, because it didn't help. Wind was still coming at us from the south. Farther along, we got into heavy rains. The only bright spot was this rainbow that seemed to dip straight into the river. Not a great photo, this, but it was the best I could do with my phone through the truck window.

All's well that ends well, and we made it home safe and sound, if a little rattled by such a harrowing drive.

Okay, so thus ends the episode of camper repair in Yakima. I'm hoping we've seen the last of "Adventurer" in Yakima, where the camper was born. And we're really hoping that will put an end to the trouble we've had with the slides. We were tired when we got home, and so I got back to my quilt binding. Sadie could hardly wait to take her place on my lap under the quilt.

So it's Sunday, which means it's Blueberry Oatmeal Pancake day. I'll get back to my quilt binding, and I'll need to trace out the next plate for the Pieces of the Past quilt. When I last left it, I had 8 of 9 plates stitched. 

I'll trace the ninth for stitching today. There is still a large panel that will need to be stitched before I can start sewing this together, but it's moving along. We'll be heading south in a few weeks, and there are a couple of projects I'd like to get finished before we leave. I'll say more about that as I go. For now, I'm just glad to be home safe and sound.