Cross Country

Rain greeted us for the start of our travel day, but stopped long enough for us to empty our tanks. 

This was the first of many interesting things we saw today.

As we traveled south and west, we drove up, around and through mountains, hills, and valleys.  The sky ranged from sunny to black clouds and everything in between.

US 2 took us back to Spokane.  Yesterday we ventured into the new, eastern part of this sprawling city.  Today we drove past that and deep into the oldest part of the city. 

Our next surprises—marijuana for sale.

Modern sculpture on the oldest part of town,

and learning that Spokane is built across a couple of hills like Cincinnati, OH.  We abandoned US 2 for I90 here.

Although an interstate, 90 is very scenic.  It took us south then west through the Columbia River Basin, where we encountered vast lava outcroppings,,

long natural lakes,

and more surprises like this camel cloud,

y’s in the road (can you guess why the y’s?)

two roads, Q and O that run north east and south east,

and tall tree fences (wind breaks, we think).

Rolling through the Yakima Valley, we discovered that from a sagebrush desert

irrigation made things grow.  Signs along the fences identified timothy and alfalfa hays, beans, field and sweet corns, sunflowers,

and these—another “can you guess”.

Break time found us at this scenic viewpoint.  It was very nice with paved walking paths wandering along the rim of the river canyon with several info boards explaining the topography and geology.  Across the river we could see the wind turbines mentioned below.  Also over there is an extinct petrified gingko forest.

Both areas can be accessed by crossing this bridge. Since I90 crossed it, we did too.   The picture below was taken from the middle.

That tiny white dot near the top of the hill is some people at the viewpoint we just left.

Drama in the sky. 

I90 took us all the way across Washington state across the Cascade range and through a couple of national forests.

We left it just east of Seattle to go south west on State Road 18 through Tacoma and ran into this—the name of the game for the rest of our trip.  Stop and start, flow and crawl along 18 and  I5, we finally made it to the Elk’s Club in Lakewood where we were made very welcome.

The y’s were entrance/exit to/from rest stops.  The mystery crop was carrots.

Louise and Duane