One of my seatmates was a photographer. We were talking about Maid Rite because of a picture in Roadtrip USA. I said that the southernmost of the restaurants I'd seen was in Rolla, Missouri, which happened to be home of the baby Stonehenge. This led to a discussion of Sam Hill's Maryhill Stonehenge, which is on my list of things to see. He asked if I was going to visit on the solstice. It hadn't occurred to me! Unfortunately, I think I will miss it by a few days. That's very disappointing.

As we approached Seattle the cloud cover below us was almost total. I could see glimpses of snow-capped mountain peaks now and again, but mostly I just saw a lumpy blanket of white. The one exception, which was unfortunately on the other side of the plane and difficult to see, was Mount Rainier, which rode the clouds link an island.

Car rental places only guarantee a class of car, not a specific model, so I ended up with a Sebring instead of a Mustang. I could have waited a while, but it isn't that big a deal. In fact, I'm not sure it makes any difference at all.

It was cool and overcast when we landed and stayed that way until I was out on I 405 heading for I 90. Then, miraculously, the clouds broke and blue sky and sunshine peaked through. I stopped to buy something to drink and to put the top down.

It was still cloudy, not completely overcast, and the higher I got the cloudier and colder it got. The roads were lined with tall pines on incredibly steep mountainsides.

On the way down the other side of the mountains I stopped in Roslyn, the small town that posed as the even smaller Cicely, Alaska, on the television program Northern Exposure. The added "'s" has been removed from the Roslyn Café mural, Joel's office is now a souvenir shop (with overpriced postcards), and the inside of the Brick is nothing at all like the television show. It is still a nice bar, Washington's oldest. I had a hamburger and two beers, a Red Hook and an Alaskan Amber Ale.

Once I was out of the mountains the sky cleared completely and the temperature rose to an almost perfect level. There were a lot of farms and a lot of irrigation ditches. I think they were growing wheat, but I'm not sure.

Where there were no planted fields, the land looked very much like the high desert of Utah and Nevada, complete with sagebrush and folded-looking hills. I am pretty sure the farmland would look like this, too, if not for the irrigation.

Many of the farms had long sprinklers watering the plants. These are very similar to the ones I've seen in Wisconsin and Illinois.

(A few years ago while returning from House on the Rock with Teri I noticed that, with the sun behind and at the right angle, a rainbow will form in the spray of these sprinklers and run the length of them as they are passed. I saw that effect thrice today.)

Somewhere I passed a huge wind turbine just like the one I saw in Texas last year.

I unmistakably crossed the Colorado on a very pretty bridge, then took a "Scenic Lookout" turn to look back over the river. The view was stunning. Up on the hill in the other direction were horses that appeared to be made of metal. They were running.

In Ephrata I stumbled upon a gorgeous abandoned motel. I mostly observed the "No Trespassing" signs and didn't explore too much, but I did see over a dozen white wooden units, and these continued around a corner at the rear. Each had a covered carport attached.

Nothing I had seen or heard about Washington State prepared me for the scenery between Soap Lake and Grand Coulee. I saw what I can only describe as mesas and buttes with large piles of black rocks piled at the bottom. The faces of these cliffs were white and brown and red and yellow. The red and yellow especially looked like the bits of red paint left on a barn that has otherwise weathered to a bare grey wood. I don't know if they are colors of rock or some surface feature, like a fungus.

The most striking part about this stretch of bare or mostly bare rock landscape, spotted only by occasional scruffy plants, was that a very large lake filled the areas between the hills! People were fishing and boating. Seagulls were swooping about.

This lake (or these lakes, since I have no idea how many there are) is obviously manmade. The contrast between what is at eye level and everything above is astonishing.

In Grand Coulee I found two motels, and both had No Vacancy neon lit. I had decided to go back the way I had come to find a place to stay when I noticed that the neon NO in the window of the Coulee House Motel was no longer on. I stopped and got a room. She said someone had just canceled.

The room is not one of those that face the dam, but it is still nice, in spite of the painted cinder block walls. It has no microwave, but it actually has an oven, four-burner range, refrigerator, and sink. I am sitting at the small dining bar writing this.

I walked right across the street to watch the laser show projected on the face of the dam. It wasn't quite as tacky as I anticipated, and its pro-American pro-Progress message was tempered just a tiny bit with an acknowledgment that many native Americans were displaced by the construction of the dam.

A Charleton Heston sound-alike gave voice to the Columbia River, telling of its history and that of the dam. I shot a roll of film with long exposures. The results may be interesting.

Tomorrow I will go back and photograph the windmill folk art (the light wasn't too good tonight) and tour the dam.