For those of you that are familiar with Washington State, we went over Snoqualmie Pass and turned north at Cle Elum. We followed highway 97 all the way to the Canadian border going through such little towns as Omak and Tonasket. We detoured off the beaten path here and there trying to find things that looked promising (based on internet blurbs) but didn't find much of anything. We did find some interesting driving and a mildly-interesting antique store when we detoured off at the town of Riverside though. When it became time for us to start looking for a place to spend the night we were at the border town of Oroville. The problem was the only thing we could find was one nasty-looking rundown motel in the center of town, and a hoity-toity resort on the edge of Lake Osoyoos--Nothing in between. That resort had a 3-night minimum, but sported such cool things as music that played from loudspeakers (at least around the office area), tons of Adirondack chairs painted in various pastel shades, and a gate that was locked at 11pm. It was a huge cluster of matching bungalow-type buildings right on shore of the lake. I didn't even get to the point of finding out how much it would have cost. We opted instead to cross into Canada and look around in the city of Osoyoos. We finally found "motel row" but by then there weren't a whole lot of vacancies (after all, it was the 4th of July weekend). We found a "so-so" motel in a great location, right on a beach of the lake. (Lake Osoyoos is a long lake, half in the US and half in Canada.) We hoped to get our pictures of the day posted from there but our internet pretty much fizzled out before we were able to. Our first day was marked with disappointment as far as our quest for photographic opportunities, but we still got a lot of nice shots here and there.
Yesterday was different.
We hit such a wide variety of places. A great outdoor museum in Molson that held a ton of very interesting equipment, implements, and artifacts from a century ago. Just up the road (still in Molson) was a great school/museum that was by two sweet old ladies, one of which was quite a character. We're sorry we didn't get a picture of them. They had both went to school there! We stopped into the little bitty town of Chesaw (only two blocks long?) and enjoyed a couple hours at their 68th annual rodeo. That was a lot of fun. We also hit such places as the "ghost town" of Bodie, the town of Nespelem, and the Grand Coulee Dam.
As the day grew older we pondered where we were going to stop for the night. We discussed it for a while and we decided that we had finished up our "list" of places that we wanted to see. Instead of having to spend money on another motel for the night, we decided to go ahead and drive home. We got home at 1am, but that's okay--We got to wake up in our own bed, have the whole day here for us to catch up on things, and we got to avoid the undoubtedly heavy traffic that always happens on a 3-day holiday weekend.
We spent almost the whole weekend on lesser-used two-lane roads, many of which had fantastic scenery. On some of them we hardly ever saw another car. There were a couple times when we were on dirt roads for several miles, and not only were they nice, smooth roads but they were also some of the best scenery we saw.
It was a great time!
Here are some facts from the weekend excursion:
Total miles driven: 750
Pictures taken: Rick = 560+ / Sue = 1100
Best quality highways: Ferry County
Most unique "thing" we found: The Gehrke Whirligig park in Electric City (near the Coulee Dam)
The best slice of Americana: The Chesaw Rodeo
From the Molson school museum we could have walked into Canada (it was visible at the top of the ridge above us.)
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