One Lap

Date: 10/07/2013

Day: 11

Location: Spokane, WA

Miles Today: 325

Total Miles: 1930

The Big Right Turn, Ellensburg, On the Road, Ritzville, Lifeline360

The Big Right Turn

The Colonel has a trick mind. Not a scary trick like playing the zither, or a potentially lucrative trick like spinning plates on a stick. Mostly he is a well know exemplar of Swiss Cheese for brains and pathologically bad short term memory. (He can, his acquaintances say, hide Easter Eggs from himself.) However he has a remarkable memory for places. He has, while in England in a place not visited for 20 years, pointed to the left without looking and identified the pub on the corner; really. He could lead a tour of Napula, the Peloponnese, Greece right now; really.

The drive north up the Pacific coast is very familiar. It feels comfortable, its' story known mile by mile. With the turn east today this journey enters terra incognita. Immediately the land forms are different. It was rainy east of Seattle and over the coast range, but as soon as the ~3000 foot mountains were passed, the road entered the great eastern Washington rain shadow. In the space of about a mile, it went from fair sized pine trees to shrubs to scrub bush. Remarkable. This land was under a 1300 foot thick ice sheet 15,000 years ago and the gently rolling hills reflect this fact.

This is wheat and potato and corn country -- already. One expected this Midwest-ism to start further east. And flat, mostly. And empty, almost entirely. And displaying the wonderful Big Sky with thunderheads like floating mountains that is part of the package.

Ellensburg

The rule, self imposed, is that we must stop and get out of the car every two hours or so, preferably in a town. In the town, we are required (by blogflogger Shiff) to find something interesting to look at. Boring is in the mind of the beholder, he says.

Ellensberg was a fuel (never less than half a tank on this trip) and lunch stop. Just off the interstate it looked like a failed version of Barstow. Nothing at all to recommend even a brief stay. The town, however is really a nice place on this crisp fall day.

Ellensburg is the home of Central Washington University. I can't decide if this is where Opie Taylor would have gone to college or the proper setting for Animal House.

If you look really closely, you'll see that this was once Washington State Normal School

This is not Berkeley. All the elected representatives of Ellensberg, State and Federal, are Republicans. The next time you see a banner in Berkeley suggesting that a Marine General is worthy of emulation, please report the sighting to the Colonel.

Jerrol's (for your convenience) is the off campus bookstore. Nice neon.

The Tee shirt reads: Jerrol's Zen Experience. If you don't know what cow tipping is, you need to widen your life experience.

A (cutout) cowboy, his apple, his six guns and his pickup. He lives at the Spur apartments, of course.

The Colonel stopped to take a picture of this giant gas pump gas price display.

Hiding in the grass across the street, in the weeds, as it were, was this remarkable concrete bust of an Indian. No marker, just a camper shell for company. A mystery.

On the Road

Prudence and possible weather problems dictated that this segment of One Lap be done on the Interstate. At a clock required stop in the middle of approximately I-90 nowhere, there on the ridge line ---

Horses, a bunch of horses!

Actually a bunch of steel horses. Hope they can stop before the get to the edge that cliff.

Ritzville

Ritzville will probably survive; it is the county seat of Adams county and still a major wheat shipping point.

A quiet Monday afternoon in Ritzville.

Pioneer Square

Mr. Carnegie's gift.

Really nice street art in Western Washington. This is Shontz Schuler, builder and contractor in front of the library.

This is the founder, Mr. Philip Ritz, nurseryman and florist with a sheaf of wheat rather than roses.

The Adams County Bank building. Available for sale, actually.

A nod is necessary to Mr. Keillor, I think.

It would be great to see what this looks like at night.

That's "Pool, Gambling & Video" at the Pastime Sports Center

Life360

Life360 is an iPhone app probably intended to allow parents to track the location of their children. It uses the cell net to report on the whereabouts of a specific cell phone. Both the Colonel and Mrs. Colonel have this app active on their phones. Mrs. Colonel is actually able to watch the Colonel process eastward across Washington state in pretty much real time. There he is now at the Howard Johnson's on North division Street in Spokane. Remarkable!

Tomorrow, weather permitting, the route east will shift to Highway 2, a blue rather than an "I" highway..

Monday, October 7, 2013