desert. in washington?

yes, in fact. we spent a couple days doing mostly nothing in spokane. nonetheless, my mom was able to snap the above picture of the city from across their river. i must say this about the northwest--they take their sports seriously. not only did we see countless people running and biking, but they were about to have hoopfest, a massive 3 on 3 basketball tournament at spokane. interestingly, the city also hosted the world's fair in 1873--the site was turned into a park along the riverfront afterward, and it is also home to gonzaga university. anyway, this morning we began heading from spakane, on the extreme eastern side of the state, to walla walla, in the southeastern part, just a few miles from oregon. on the way, much of what we saw was this: fields of wheat intermingled with grazing land, filled with these beautiful purple wildflowers. and i do mean filled.around lunchtime we rolled into walla walla, famous for their sweet onions and wine, named after an indian tribe that had inhabited the area. we ate at a delicious local place called olive and then went on a remarkably in-depth and quite interesting historic tour of downtown, in heat that rivals that of raleigh back home. (apparently this part of washington is in a desert--it gets over 100 in summer and below freezing in winter, with a freezing fog. that sounds scary). we went to a few wine stores to do some tastings, and i did learn quite a lot--the people were quite nice and helpful. anyway, by about 3:30 we realized that there really wasn't all that much else that we wanted to do in town, so we decided to push on.

but first we headed slightly to the west of town to go to the whitman mission, now a historic site. in 1835, reverend whitman and his young wife, along with a few others were sent out to what would become the oregon territory. whitman was trying to convert the cayuse indians--he was also a doctor, and helped to treat them. eventually, a small pox epidemic wiped out many of the indians, despite whitman giving them medicine. when the indians saw that it did not work as well on them as on the white men, they blamed whitman, and came to the mission, murdering him, his wife, and 9 other people. the incident led leaders in washington, dc to put a government in place in the oregon territory, the first on the west coast. whitman, incidentally, also helped to carve the oregon trail.

after visiting the mission, we went south into oregon, stopping in the town of pendleton. my family has a special relationship with pendleton--my grandmother used to sell their fantastic wool blankets and clothes in her store, and we all have quite a bit of it. so when we saw pendleton, we pulled over. sure enough, the mill is in the town where it all started 101 years ago. we decided to spend the night here, and found a great b and b called the riverwalk. much like walla walla, but much smaller, pendleton is a cute old west meets west coast town. we had dinner and then retired for the night. tomorrow morning we are going to go on a tour of the mill before heading west along the columbia river towards portland.