This area seems to be THE area for onions, potatoes, corn and wheat, sunflowers and then just down the road a bit you've got apples, apples and more apples! We had fun one day just watching the tractors first digging up the onions, then the trucks hauling them from the fields over to the processing plants and dumping them and off they go again! The smell was so strong just watching them, my eyes were watering! What an education though!
Another day trip was over to see Palouse Falls in Franklin. They drop 198 feet! Even in late August they had a great deal of water, which I was delighted to see. They are considered the "official waterfall of Washington". Carved more than 13,000 years ago, Palouse Falls is among the last active waterfalls on the Ice Age floods path. It was a nice trip!
We did a day's driving loop and wound up stopping at the Ginko Petrified Forest State Park in Ellensburg. Interesting place, with a number of petrified logs on display of a variety of trees. A nice museum with a video explaining how they get petrified (volcano & floods and centuries of time). Pretty cool, actually.
The cutest town we visited (twice) was Ritzville. It had a number of great old buildings for me to photograph as well as some wonderful metal sculptures that their local artist created for them. They are intended to have historical connection to the city, its forefathers and the agricultural industry that surrounds the city. They were pretty unique, I thought.
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| Plus a funny one outside an art studio! |
They also had a really cool Railroad Depot Museum that not only kept many of it's own original pieces like the 1910 Ticket Office, terrazzo floors. It also houses wonderful turn of the century artifacts and memorabilia like a horse drawn hearse, and an old sleigh, trunks, etc. They also have a beautiful restored Northern Pacific Railway Caboose (c1970).
Our second trip to Ritzville was to attend their Wheatland Communities' Fair! A four-day event over the Labor Day Holiday. It's always fun to see local community fairs, and as I've shared, they are all different! We thought, being that this was a multi-community, it could be bigger than the last one (and it charged an entrance fee), it would be bigger than the last one we went to...but, no, it was actually smaller! Prettier setting, more spread out, in a park setting and nice metal barns, with a rodeo later in the evening (which we didn't stay for), but less to see and do. More kid's activities tho, "good food" vs "junk food". Far fewer entries in the Arts and Crafts section, which I was really surprised at. We did stay and watch the the animal auction though, which was fun! Amazing to watch young kids herding in thousand pound cows like city kids pulling on a dog. ;-)
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| I loved that the judges made comments on the photo contests! |
All in all, it's been a fun experience being out here in the farmland of central Washington - good for "city folk" to experience it! Time for us to move on to Tacoma and be with family for awhile now...
...kicking back in Washington, Marie
If you wish to view the rest of the photos from this trip, you can at my Flickr account at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/74905158@N04/
