Second of two favorite weekends in WA.

Hot Air Balloon Stampede!!

Most photogenic of activities we've done thus far!  Wednesday we heard that kids could get a free ride, tethered at the park.  Thursday, Judd's science class is interrupted by a surprise landing of a hot air balloon on school grounds.  I pull off the road on my way home from work as it looks like a balloon is about to land in the neighborhood.  Judd and I take a walk around our block, and a balloon HAS just landed in a cul-de-sac.  We're sitting in our back yard and hear a  fire shooting and a balloon lands in the next door yard through the trees.... 

All just foreshadowing...... Friday night is "Night Glow."  We walk the 1.5 miles to the neighborhood park and it's a feast of lights.  Judd was hopeful for a food truck (although we'd just wolfed down dinner) and there was one solo coffee kiosk with a long line.  I staked out two seats on the bleachers while Judd found us a hot coffee. Inspirational music played and a narrator in a deep voice tried to make balloons sound sexy.  We thought the balloons were going to go somewhere but the "nite glow" is all about lighting them up to music while tethered on the ground.  My favorite event was the dueling banjo piece, competing balloons lighting up to the Deliverance song, but my mittens and Scotch-infused-coffee prevented me from recording that. Still, we were impressed! We set our alarms to get up for the 7:15am launch...... but when we walked the 1. 5 miles home in traffic (avoiding the car congestion) and then watched Tangled (a Disney movie where I recalled a launch of nighttime air balloons)... we were up pretty late for us.

But when we hit the 6:15am snooze button and didn't get up until 6:45-- we still made it on time, just not with the carafe of coffee we envisioned.  But SO worth the trip. I was wrapped in our red and blacked checked picnic blanket which just happens to match Judd's red and blacked checked Maine-Man jacket. We were allowed to walk amongst the balloons and handlers even before they were inflated.It was amazing to see how they get inflated, how the fire doesn't burn the strings, how they clear the trees without bumping each other.  The goal was that they'd all race to the airport and see who could throw a dollar bill at the judge's chair. 

We stopped for breakfast and made it to the airport to see just a couple stragglers land.  But after a day of chores/homework, we set the alarm for 6:30 Sunday so we could go again, THIS time WITH coffee. After balloons at sunrise, we planned a walk. We had done enough home chores and homework to deserve a walk in the woods. We drove to Oregon (20 min) and had breakfast at a little sketchy -looking diner.  It reminded me of a Kenyan disco  (a former garage-like building now with bars on the doors and windows.  But it was really authetico Mexican breakfast and WAY too much food.  In another 30 min we were at the trailhead of Harris Park along the Walla Walla River.  A beautiful fall day for a hike. Judd kept trying to take pictures of the caddisflies. Truly a spectacular weekend.

Two of my favorite weekends in Washington!

Chapter 1 :  Lake Chelan

 

Last weekend we took an extra Friday off and drove  4 hours north and camped at Lake Chelan (pronounced Shay'-lan.) It's a 50 mile long lake and the third deepest in the USA (after only Crater Lake and Tahoe.) WoW!  
We arrived in time to set up our tent (the ONLY tent in the tent-only area, as most of mid-October campers are RV-ers)  and then we dashed off for fire wood and a vineyard.  Nefarious sits up on the hill overlooking the lake. We sat in the last rays of afternoon sun in Virgin Island-colored plastic adirondack chairs. After that happy hour, we returned to camp for a walk and to warm up our pre-made beef stew.  We played some backgammon and then scrolled through our phone-pic memories of vacations-past.  At 12, 2, 4, 5, and 6AM we were reminded how chilly camping in Oct can be. We had set our alarms (NOT a usual camping deal) but wanted to make the last-of-the-season-8am voyage of the Lady of the Lake-- a boat cruise that traversed the entire 50 mile length of the lake to Stehekin, only reachable by boat, plane or hiking.  We were so ultra-camping dressed with long underwear and LuLaRoe under our jeans that we were quite comfortable on the outside deck for abut 90% of the tour. We could keep migrating our chairs for different sun angles and vantage points. We did imbibe tea from the snack bar, reminiscing that a similar cruise on Loch Katrine  on our Scotland tour would add a wee dram of whisky to your coffee or hot chocolate. But we'did bring a pretty fine picnic for our hour at Stehekin, embellished with stuffed croissants from the local bakery. Snow still dots the highest peaks of the Cascades surrounding the lake.
I became quite bold on the 4 hour cruise back to town by photographing strangers.  There's the "cool" guy in too-short shorts, the gaggle of  women-traveling-alone, the cute couple asleep on each other's shoulders.  And, strange, but not a stranger:  Judd dozing or Judd with his pants tucked into his socks for cold air control. And while we're cruising, we get a bonus pic of Malindi and Ryley summiting Katahdin with their sig O's.

Back in town, Judd finally finds the perfect pairing for wine:  BBQ!. And we splurge and get the last room in a hotel, rather than cold-camp again.  BONUS:  hot tub with long white bathrobes with which to get there.  NICE!

What's a Grand Coulee and why is there a dam?

Wikipedia describes a coulee, "or coulée, as a term applied rather loosely to different landforms, all of which refer to a kind of valley or drainage zone. The word coulee comes from the Canadian French coulée, from the French word couler meaning "to flow".  The Grand Coulee is an ancient river bed in the state of Washington. We read about the guy (Bretz) who proposed the theory that these bizarre land forms were carved out, not from volcanoes, not from meteors, not from wind erosion, but from a massive flood, described as "Biblical proportions" from Missoula Montana-- many ice age floods as the result of ice dams forming massive lakes which would thaw, collapse and send floods again.  Above (Judd's panorama pic of Dry Falls) is where a waterfall many times bigger than Niagara Falls must have crashed. "This 3.5-mile-wide chasm of basalt, with a drop of 400 feet, was left high and dry thousands of years ago as the last of several Ice Age floods swept through the Grand Coulee. This is one of the most extraordinary landscapes to be found along the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail. "--also Wikipedia

Good Nova video for 2.45 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05KNNNt5mvo

or a longer read of the rebel geologists (and the 40 years of research before someone believed them):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods

Then there's the Dam.  What a cool visitor center!  We watched a 42 min old style newsreel-like movie of why and how the dam was built-- all black and white, all retro1933-1941.  You can watch it too: Grand Coulee Dam:  A man-made marvel

https://www.usbr.gov/pn/grandcoulee/history/index.html

But you can't watch the last night of the laser show!  We dined in the town of Coulee and then walked back across the bridge over the Columbia River to the outdoor part of the Visitor Center.  The lights blinked a little cheesy story of the dam in pictures, with barely an homage to the indigenous people displaced by the building.

The dam is still run by the Bureau of Reclamation. The dam generates more than 21 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity for eleven western states.  And water is pumped over the hills to irrigate a large part of the county, known for producing more potatoes in one county then anywhere else in the US. The dam is one of the largest concrete structures in the world. After an airport-level security check the next morning, we were allowed to go on a tour inside the  power plant and up top the dam. My engineer-dude was happily impressed.

Grand Coulee Dam  Hoover Dam
550 feet height          726 feet
5,223 feet length       1,224 feet

East/West butter

We couldn't figure it out.  Ever since we resupplied our kitchen from the local Goodwill in Oregon last year, we've had the messiest butter dish-- always smeared with soft butter, always unsightly. We thought it was  defective butter dish.  We looked in all kinds of other stores and they were all the same size:  defective. 

Judd finally went on line to look for some kind of Tupperware substitute we could buy. Come to find out, it's not the defective dish:  THE BUTTER IS A DIFFERENT SIZE OUT WEST!!
Check out this 16 second youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUcJ80MWEcc



We're now the proud owner of this clean "suits western or eastern-size butter" OXO dish. I assume the OXO means hug-kiss-hug.  The old dish is back to Goodwill in Walla Walla.  Maybe someone will buy it as a nut dish.

Learn something new every decade!

Triple Nickles [sic] and POW stories

One of the things we learned on the  Pendleton Underground Tour was that Pendleton was the
training ground for an all black battalion of fire-fighting parachuters during World War II called the
Triple Nickles. Every hear of such a thing? Me neither. Nor had Judd and I ever heard that the western
states had been bombed by Japanese incendiary balloons during that war either.  Some balloons sailed
as far as Iowa! One of the reasons this troop was not sent to the European conflict was because of
fear of the racism there at the time. When the western states started experiencing forest fires from
the Japanese bombs, the trained troop of smokejumpers was ready to go.

http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/555th-parachute-infantry-battalion-triple-nickles-1944-1947

On a different note: the third Friday in September is National POW/MIA Recognition Day.  
The Walla Walla VA has an annual lunch/remembrance program. There was a small table set
for one missing guest. The Red Cross sponsored lunch and the station theater was packed. The
highlight, by far, was the personal story of Laurence Friese, a retired US Navy commander who was
a prisoner of war in Vietnam for 5 years. He was warm and funny, if describing being and A-6 Intruder
bombardier and getting shot down over North Vietnam and then being taken prisoner can be funny.
He said he realized it was his fault for breaking the cardinal rule of war: don’t fly over an area you
just bombed. He spent the first 18 months in solitary confinement. He was later in a barracks
area of the “Hanoi Hilton “ with 41 other prisoners. When he was freed under Operation Homecoming
March 1973, he said he was welcomed back to the States like royalty. He traveled home on the
same plane as Senator John McCain. He exuded how proud he was of his fellow POWs but
thanked all the other Vietnam Vets who served, knowing they faced hardships as well. One
more parting joke: he mentioned he got paid less than his plane mate.  It turns out POWs got
paid an amount for every day incarcerated and since his mate had been captured the first day
they ejected from the plane, and Larry walked through the jungle for 4 days before he was captured,
he was paid less than his mate for only 1,842 days of incarceration.
http://www.veterantributes.org/TributeDetail.php?recordID=504

Incredible stories!