Hey There! It's 11:07 AM PDT, 49°F, cloudy
There are a couple of days to catch up on, but on the whole, it's more driving. As I write this, we are at our final destination visiting Daughter, and DW will remain here while I go overseas for an Oriental visit.
We left Pocatello ID Monday morning heading for Pendleton OR. The scenery continues to be incredible, even when it's barren-looking. I still cannot understand how these hills have no trees or any type of shrubbery on them in some places. Higher peaks remain snowcapped.
On this leg we stopped in Boise ID at the request of Son2 on the hunt for the ice cream potato. This is a dish unique to Idaho, and apparently this region of ID. There is a place called the Westway Diner that claims to be the place where the ultimate refinement of this unique dish was formulated. It consists of a creamy vanilla ice cream blob in the shape of a potato, dusted with cocoa powder to give it that baked potato look. It is split in half like a baked potato would be, and in the split a dollop of whipped cream is added. The dish has chocolate sauce in it, so you can scoop the sauce up while eating. There are some peanuts and Oreo cookie crumbs to complete the dish. DW and I split one - pretty good! Originally all these ingredients when into a baked potato skin, as the dish was originally conceived by a vendor at the Idaho State Fair in 1976. I don't believe anyone serves the dish in a potato skin anymore. It also just so happened that this place served finger steaks, so we split a finger steak basket as well. These finger steaks were a lot less crunchy. The batter was more akin to what you'd experience eating sweet and sour pork. Much tastier IMO. And these were fried in regular frying oil of some sort, not beef tallow. A smoother, less crunchy treat. I liked this recipe better. It came with tater tots, which DW loves. The whole experience was worth the stop. We arrived at Pendleton without further incident and hunkered down for the night. We did not bother to find a place for dinner, as we ate the last of the finger steaks and tots and contented ourselves with that.
Tuesday we took off for Olympia. I decided I wanted to take a more scenic route and get off the interstate, since we had time to kill. I chose to take US Route 12, which crosses White Pass in the Cascades. The drive to Yakima was routine, although we did notice a lot of flooding taking place in the Yakima Valley. The Yakima River was almost out of its banks, and you could see that recently it must have been over the banks, leaving a few flooded fields here and there. The region has had excessive rain recently, and the rain has made some of the area prone to mud slides,
Once we got off the interstate at Yakima and started west on Rt 12, the drive became a combination of thrilling scenery, heavy rain, snowpack on the shoulder, fog, and bad stretches of road. While there was no snow on the road itself, it was wet from the rain. It is one of those roads that is just wide enough to let traffic pass both ways, and no wider. It's also full of twists and turns. It passes through the Snoqualmie and Gifford-Pinchot National Forests. White Pass IMO should be re-named White Knuckle Pass, as the driving in this instance was a white-knuckle affair. I took it very slow, and was quite fortunate not to have a whole lot of traffic traversing the road with me. I think I had to pull over maybe three times to let those wanting to go faster down the road. The biggest piece of luck was that I was never in front of an 18-wheeler, and never ever saw a westbound truck as I was on the road. At one curve in the road an eastbound truck came barreling around the corner at what I would have thought was an unreasonable speed given the conditions, and I got over to the right as far as possible, fearing he'd miss the turn. The scenery - what I managed to see of it anyway - was spectacular, but the fog and rain made the driving treacherous for me. I would love to do this drive again on a beautiful, sunny, dry day in the summer, when I'd have the time to stop at overlooks and take in the view. But I would not want to do it again under yesterday's conditions. When we got to the bottom, I stopped at the first gas station I saw to pee. I grabbed a Starbucks Doubleshot and a cinnamon roll as a reward for making it over the pass.
We got to the hotel in Tumwater and settled in, having a nice meal at a local Thai place we've been to previously. Daughter came over around 7:30, and we had a nice visit. She went home, and we went to bed around 11:00 PM. Quite the day!
'Til We Meet Again!