The last 2 days have been full of awesome scenery.  While we were in Orcas and in Victoria, we had wonderful weather.  Yesterday we had misty rain on us all through the North Cascades.  But we still stopped at every scenic view and short trail that we could.  The western side of the Cascades is like a rain forest, or maybe it IS a rain forest.  We even saw dogwoods, but they were Pacific Dogwoods, and the blooms were bigger.

Ferns were all over the ground, and the evergreens were thick and tall.  Apparently the Western Hemlock is the main tree, but there are Douglas Firs and Western Red Cedars also.  The road between the two sections of the North Cascades National Park was just opened a short while ago, and snow was piled up on the passes.  We couldn’t see full views because of the misty rain clouds, but it was beautiful enough.  Waterfalls were everywhere because of the snow melting.  (I am addicted to waterfalls.)

When we got on the other side, it was dryer and warmer.  We stayed at a small town called Winthrop.  A beautiful river flowed behind our hotel room!  The town looked like an old western town with board sidewalk, etc.  It would have been a perfect place to spend some time.

  On our hotel balcony! Western look!

Today we saw Grand Coulee Dam, a massive structure that makes a 151 mile-long lake extending to Canada.

The rest of the day we went through rolling wheat fields until we got to Spokane.  What a neat city!  A river runs through it with massive falls during spring and early summer.  There is a big river front park in the middle of town with a fountain, a carousel, and best of all, a gondola over the falls.  Now that is my kind of adventure!  It wasn’t a short ride either.  Loved it!  (another waterfall for me)

Before I begin updating our latest adventures, I must tell about something that we saw a few days back.  We were traveling through the Columbia River Gorge—river on the right and a wall of rock on the left.  We looked up, and there were 2 mountain goats!  Wow!

As I mentioned in my last installment, we set out on the ferry to Victoria, BC.  Our friends, Tom and Carol, are a lot of fun.  Tom does not know a stranger and is very witty, (well crazy actually).  They are able to give us a lot of information about not only the San Juan Islands where they live, but Victoria also.  Tom made reservations for us at the Swans Hotel, an old place with a restaurant and a brew pub.  Most things are in walking distance.  However, we had decided to stop at Buchart Gardens before checking in.  Somehow, though, we missed the turnoff, so that idea went down the tubes.  But we had all seen the Gardens before, so we decided to just enjoy the town of Victoria.

Our hotel room was unusual—2 story.  There were 2 bedrooms (we were sharing the hotel room), but the bathroom was downstairs.  One bathroom for 4 people?  But we managed to live with it, just scheduled bath times at different times.  There was a kitchen, and Carol brought many snacks for our lunches—cheese, pate, “designer” bread, olives, etc.  We had a fake fireplace and a patio.  We spent some time just relaxing in the room.

The parliament buildings here are so impressive.  They stand right at the harbor where all the tourist action is.

I supposed we could have had a tour of the building if we had taken the time.  But we had a castle to see.  This castle, Craigdorroch, was built by a coal magnate.  After his death it was used for many different things, a school for one.  The paneling in the building was so magnificent. I like it when I can tour a place like this at my own pace.

  This picture is looking up the staircase.  You can see the wood here.

We ate wonderful meals in Victoria at excellent restaurants, in fact, we ate way too much!

I can’t leave this blog without telling again how beautiful Orcas Island is.  It is heavily forested, hilly, with lakes as well as the ocean.  We passed one area of water, a sound and saw funny sticks in the ground. Tom said it was an oyster bed!  As I said before, their view is magnificent.  This morning it was very foggy, and I took this picture before we left.  It shows ocean currents, and it looks like a river with grass beside it. But this is all water.

One of the most impressive things in this area is Mount St. Helens which erupted 29 years ago. (I know that because we were there on the exact anniversary and everything was free.)  Weyerhauser company planted a lot of trees afterward, so much of the blast zone is heavily forested. The recovery is very obvious and has amazed scientists at how quick it has happened.  Along the river, everything is still gray, though.

Something that most tourists don’t see is a little museum before you get in the actual park was called 7Wonders Museum.  It is sponsored by the Creation Institute and showed how quickly things were changed by the eruption.  Canyons were formed in a matter of hours or months, not millions of years.  We bought a book full of pictures written by 2 scientists that are Christians explaining these things. In this little museum there were 7 things that they showed as “wonders” discovered by this eruptions.  (Of course, I can’t remember them right now.)

One thing rather eerie is that a lava dome is building up inside the crater.  Soooo, it could erupt again!  Here in this picture the dome is the bulge in the middle.

After leaving this area, we decided to go up to Mount Rainier.  Unfortunately, by the time we got there clouds were covering the top.  The road wasn’t open all the way through the National Park because of snow.  When we got to as far as they let us go, I felt like we were in Norway.  There was supposed to be a beautiful valley, but the snow was piled too high. This mountain has 26 glaciers.  The only one we saw was this one:

I am a little disappointed that we couldn’t go all the way through the park.  Apparently May is really too early to tour in the north.  We have noticed that lots of things were not being done this early.  (Like boat cruises on the many rivers we have crossed.)

We thought about staying at the Inn at the top, but the cheapest rooms had no private baths.  (No good for old people to have to go down the hall in the middle of the night.)  And, too, looking at the snow built up there made us a little nervous since rain was expected in the area.  We knew that we might get stuck up at the top, and we were to meet some friends in Seattle.  We stayed at a little “lodge” at the bottom, and it did rain during the night.

We stayed in Seattle two nights, but didn’t see any of the sights.  I washed and we spent half a day with some friends of ours who are missionaries in Thailand.  We had met them 30 years ago while we lived in California, and we have kept up with one another through the years.  They were “coincidentally” home for their yearly vacation, and based out of Seattle right now.

Now we are with friends on Orcas Island.  This man and Doug worked together for several years, and he and his wife retired on Orcas Island. It is very beautiful here and peaceful.  They have a lot of land, so have no really close neighbors. They can view the Pacific Ocean from their living room. Tomorrow we are taking the ferry to Victoria, BC.  That will be another installment.

I am sitting here in our friends’ house on Orcas Island (WA).  They are up high on a hill viewing the Pacific Ocean.  We have seen such beauty since I last wrote.  After leaving Twin Falls, we headed northwest and joined the Columbia River in Oregon. The river is massive as it flows to the Pacific Ocean.  At The Dalles (strange name for a town) we saw the longest dam in the world.  I think the town was named for some really bad rapids that were there before the dam was built.  From there we left the river and headed for Mount Hood.  We passed through vineyards and orchards.  Unfortunately, it was too early for the fruit to be ripe.  The view of the mountain was spectacular:

What you see here is also something called a “snow park.”  We weren’t sure what that meant, but on that day there were people playing the snow field.  On the way back down, we stopped at the little stream where Doug collected some “river rocks” for the flower bed.  This was one of the few streams that we saw that was shallow enough to expose the rocks.

Then we continued along the Columbia River Gorge to get to the place where there were several waterfalls.  Unfortunately, this was Sunday afternoon, and people were everywhere.  This was a place where you could go free and take your children and have picnics, so it was hard to find places to park by these falls.  Here is a picture of the bottom of one of them.

Today (Friday) was the day we played on that awesome golf course.  It was eerie to be down in a canyon seeing and hearing a waterfall as we played.  The game was not the point, but I had a chance to play without being under pressure that someone was behind us rushing me.  It was such an enjoyable afternoon.  Here are a few pictures:

Next we will be in Oregon.

The area around Twin Falls, ID is awesome.  Today, (Thursday) we decided not to play golf because of possible thunderstorms.  (Which turned out to be a good decision.)  We did sight-seeing instead.  First, we went to one of the falls in the area, Shoshone Falls.  We had never heard of it, but it is called “the Niagara Falls of the west.”  From this picture, you can see why:

We were told that the amount of water diminishes as spring and summer arrive because the water is diverted to water the fields in the area.  Unlike Niagara, there is no commercialization in the area.  The land on the south side was given to the area as a park, and the land on the north side has private homes.  There is, as you might imagine, a  power plant.  Further up the river there is another large waterfall with a power plant beside it. There used to be two falls, thus the city got its name from the two falls side by side.

After seeing these falls, we took a little tour south of town to see a “balanced rock”.  It’s strange—we were driving though farm lands, dairies, feed lots, fairly flat land.  All of a sudden we were taken down into a section of hills with rocky sides.  At the bottom was a state park with a stream on one side and a rock wall on the other.

Then we drove on to that balanced rock.  It looks like it could fall any minute.

As we drove back to Twin Falls, the rain started to fall and the wind picked up.  The wind was really strong and interfered with any sight-seeing by the canyon that held the golf course I mentioned yesterday,  We found out that there are actually two golf courses.  The course we intend to play is on the south side of the river (a municipal course).  The one on the north side is a private, exclusive course.

We are here in Twin Falls, Idaho, after a trip through the unscenic part of Wyoming—I80.  The wind was so strong that at one rest stop, I felt blown into the restroom.  Doug saw a sign that said winds were clocked at 64 mph!  There is one town along the way called Sinclair.  It is apparently the place where Sinclair oil started.  A big refinery is still there.  There are no more Sinclair stations in Texas, but there are here in this area. 

When we crossed over into Utah, the scenery changed. There were rocky pinnacles and bluffs and then a view of snow-covered mountains close to Salt Lake City.  Near Brigham City, we went off the highway to the Golden Spike Historical Monument. This was where the two sections of rail met, making the railroad go all the way across the country.  Needless to say, the golden spike is no longer there. (No, it wasn’t stolen. They took it out right away.)

When we drove into Twin Falls, boy were we in for a surprise.  When you take the exit to the town, you drive 3 miles south. Then you begin to see in front of you canyon walls.  The city is on the other side of the Snake River Canyon, a very deep canyon. As we stopped at a view point before going over the bridge, we were in for another surprise. Down in the canyon beside the river was a golf course! Immediately we knew that we had to experience that course.

Our day in Nebraska (we could cross it in one day) was quite miserable because of a cold wind.  I had forgotten to pack jackets for this trip, not even my hooded sweat shirt.  I had bought a cute sweater/jacket at Cracker Barrel when we were driving through the south (where there were Cracker Barrels every few miles, it seemed), but this cold wind was miserable.  The sun was shining, but the wind was biting.  However, the wind didn’t stop us from enjoying the scenery.  The farmland of Nebraska was rolling, as in Iowa, and we followed the Platte River through the state.  Where the Platte divided into two rivers, the South Platte and North Platte, we took a northern “detour” to visit a two key spots on the Oregon trail.  One was a piece of rock called Chimney Rock that stuck up 400 feet into the air.  As you can imagine, it was an easily recognized landmark.

The other spot was just a little further west where the trail left the North Platte River and went through a pass called Scott’s Bluff.  We were able to drive up to the summit of this ridge where we could see in both directions.  There was a trail that went up to the summit, but it would have been out of our league even if the wind was not blowing so hard.  But it was an awesome sight to think that all those pioneers braved the dangers and the unknown to settle west.

This is the “bluff” and the trail went to the left of it.

It was a short trip from here to Mandy’s in Laramie, and we have enjoyed being with her and Mark and seeing our growing grandchildren.  We leave tomorrow for the next leg of our trip to Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

After leaving the Mississippi River to travel across Iowa, we expected to see boring corn fields.  We discovered something unusual in Eastern Iowa.  It was a community of villages that started as a religious community.  It is formally called the Amana Colonies.  They were a religious group called Inspirationalists that started in Germany in 1714.  They are not Amish or Mennonite; they didn’t have anything against modern conveniences.  They believed that the Holy Spirit was able to speak to people and give words of “prophecy”.  (Imagine that!)  After much persecution they left Germany for America.  They started first near Buffalo, New York, then later purchased 26,000 acres of land in Iowa.   They practiced truly communal living, “having all things in common” until 1932.  Now it is a big tourist spot with Bed and Breakfasts, a RV park, and many quaint houses and shops.  But the descendants of these people still live there.

There were more hills in Iowa than I expected with fields as far as we could see.

The farmlands continued into Nebraska, where we found a Danish community.  They brought a windmill all the way from Denmark, as well as a Viking house.  Have you ever seen a Viking house?  Well, here is one:

In Illinois and Indiana spring has really come.  We saw so many beautiful blooming trees, many apparently planted by the highway department!  The farms were large, but nothing had been planted yet, strange to us since it seemed like it should have been done by now.  We saw many large farmhouses and larger barns.  They are much bigger and a different shape than in Texas.  We were still seeing the rivers in the area  looking near flood stage, and even the Mississippi was high. 

We spent the night on the banks of the Mississippi in a town called Bettendorf, Iowa.  There were 4 cities there, merging together, so the area was known as the Quad Cities.  There were a lot things to see that we certainly had not known about.  We went to the John Deere Pavilion; apparently the world headquarters of John Deere is here in Moline, IL.  John Deere started as a blacksmith and invented a steel plow that worked better in the prairie area.  From there to now, quite  something.  Several of the huge farm machines were displayed in the Pavilion. 

In the middle of the Mississippi was an island called Arsenal Island because the government has stored  arsenals there during wars.  There was also a big army base there, as well as a National Cemetery.  There were thousands of graves. 

There was also a confederate cemetery on the island.