West Coast Here We Come

After leaving Devils Tower, we took a few days to make our way to Washington. We made one night stops in Billings, MT; Garrison, MT; and Spokane, WA. We saw some breathtaking scenery along the way. You really begin to understand why they call the area Big Sky. It seemed like you could see forever into the distance. We drove through areas that were brown, dusty and dry as a bone and then we would be in a mountainous area with lots of coniferous trees, rivers and valleys. What was really cool was watching clouds at a distance that you knew were part of a rain squall and watch it move through an area but not be near where we were driving. The geology of the western part of the US has always intrigued me. You can see the rock layers formed over thousands of years and in some places the folding that also took place to form the mountains.  Many of the areas we have traveled through have had fire bans due to the lack of rain. While driving, we could see where there had been forest fires.

 Getting ready to cross the Columbia River

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 We have seen many wind farms throughout our travels.

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 Big Sky panorama while on the road

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 Majestic mountains

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Rainstorm at a distance

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When we arrived just north of Seattle, we ended up staying four nights at an RV park in the town of Bothell, WA. While there, we toured the Chateau St. Michelle Winery and spent a day in Seattle visiting the Pike Place Market. We had an excellent tour guide at the winery. She took us through the winery where we saw the huge vats where fermentation takes place, we saw chardonnay being bottled and boxed. In fact, we were told that this year’s grape crop has ripened early and grapes are already being picked so the winery was going to be working around the clock to get the rest of their wine bottled so they would have space to put this year’s crop. We sampled several wines and purchased a couple bottles to bring home.

Chateau St. Michelle Winery

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Pike Place Market is a public market that overlooks the waterfront. It opened in 1907 and is one of the oldest public farmer’s markets in the US. There were multiple floors in the market place selling fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, cheese, flowers, crafts, clothing, bakery goods, candy, jewelry and many, many other items. We ate lunch at a restaurant that overlooked the market place. We had hoped to go up in the Space Needle and look out over all of Seattle, but when you purchase your voucher, you then have to show up at the Space Needle in the morning and they will give you a time that you can return to take the ride up the Space Needle. It could be anytime between 10:00 AM and 7:00 PM that day. We did not plan to be in the city all day and didn’t want to take the chance that we would not be able to get a time early in the day to go up the Space Needle.

View of Pike Place Market from our table at Matt's in the Market

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Holding a box of cheesecake pops and a $5.00 bouquet of 

flowers while waiting in line to purchase French pastry.

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When we left the Seattle area, we headed to Oregon. We found an RV park in Aurora, OR that was not too far from the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum. This is where Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose is housed. It is something that Pete has been wanting to see for awhile and when we realized it would be on our way to the Oregon coast, we knew we would have to stop to see it.

Panorama of the Spruce Goose. The wing is not really bowed. 

My camera had to make "adjustments" to the image in order to fit

the whole plane into the picture.

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A view of the Spruce goose fuselage and engines

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The Evergreen Aviation Museum houses the Spruce Goose. You have to see it to believe it. Immense doesn’t even begin to describe how big that plane is and to think it is mostly made from laminated birch wood. I tried several times to take a picture of the plane but I just could not fit the whole thing into the viewfinder of the camera. The panorama function on my camera finally allowed me to capture the whole plane. Construction of the Spruce Goose began in 1942 and it wasn’t finished until 1947. Howard Hughes received $18,000,000 from the federal government and used $7,000,000 of his own money to build the Spruce Goose. It flew only one time and then was stored in a hangar that Howard Hughes had specially built for it. It remained there for thirty-three years. When Howard Hughes died the plane was sold, moved and put on public display. Eventually it was sold again, taken apart and transported to McMinnville, OR. We watched a video of the plane parts being transported down rivers and roads. It was mind-boggling! The aviation museum also houses many other aircraft.

A Flying Tiger aircraft

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The space museum exhibits took you through the beginnings of human space travel and ended with the ways that drones are now used in military operations. There was also an IMAX theater showing a movie about the training of fighter pilots.

View inside the Space Museum

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Northrop Grumman Chukar III Drone

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While at the RV park, we found out that there was going to be a Dahlia Festival in the town of Canby which was only about six miles away. The area is known as the Dahlia Capital of America. There were millions of dahlias of every variety and color imaginable on over 40 acres of fields at Swan Island Dahlias. They have been in business for almost 90 years and are the largest and leading grower of dahlias in the US. There were fields where you could roam among the 360 different kinds of dahlias and a building with probably close to 100 labeled displays of many of the varieties. They also had food vendors and wine tasting. It was very well attended on a very warm Saturday. The flowers were just spectacular and Pete is already thinking about growing some dahlias next year.

Just a few of the hundreds of dahlias we saw

at the Dahlia Festival

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