First part of trip is heading to the Gorge Amphitheatre for Jack Johnson concert. This is just a nice road shot. I love these hills. I think we are somewhere an hour or so before Leavenworth. This is the ride from Wenatchee to the Gorge Amphitheatre ... in George. Hot and desert like. Hot hot hot!!! You'll never guess where we are ... :) There were more people there than we expected. We didn't realize that Jack Johnson was so popular. We love his music though so shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. :D Just the view around us. And a view of us. Ha ha We love love LOOOVE this concert venue! OK, yes we are quite far back. We arrived a little later than we should have. The gates opened at 5pm and we should have arrived at 4:30, but the ride took a long time and we needed a short rest in Wenatchee hotel. The sound quality was as spectacular as the view, though, and we still loved it. Now it's the next day and we are headed over to McMinnville (area). This is a lovely canyon ride Clint found to avoid the main highways. It was gorgeous. Can you see the peekaboo of the wind farm blades? I suppose that the wind farm machines are ugly, but somehow I am obsessed with them. They give me a fantasy-sci-fi novel feeling and awe me. Still the canyon ride. This is the best part. So this is the B and B we stayed in near McMinnville. It's GRAIN SILOS. They've finished the insides. There are 5 suites. We stayed in the 'Nubian" suite ... top middle floor. The stairs up to our room. Our room. The view from our room. (Oops the camera focussed on the screen ... not the view.) This is from restaurant Agrivino. It is on the BnB property. The chef is from Italy. He and his wife run the restaurant on a reservation only basis and make everything from scratch and from locally grown. Anything they can't make or grow ... they import from Italy. It was fabulous. We ordered the Prosciutto salad, the Bolognese gnocchi and the Zola gnocchi. Then we also had the Prosciutto pizza ... and finished with desert of homemade mint-stracciatella gelato. Very fat-making, but wonderful. Yum. So delicious! Cheers! OK, next day ... we went RIDING Tennessee Walking horses from winery to winery to winery. Wow! I rode that palomino. His name was Kahlua. We all thought his name should be Kahlua AND CREAM. LOL The best views on earth always include a horse's ears! Clint looks quite comfortable. His horse, Chipper, was adorable and had such a kind eye. He was very well behaved for Clint. What a lovely area to ride in. And yes, we are riding to a winery for a tasting. Neat-o! Selfie! Clint is 3 horses behind me. The other person in the shot is just a random person on the ride. It was a nice and friendly chatty group. Here we are all mounted up and getting ready to set off for winery #3. I am sitting on my mount. Heading back to the stable now. Boy! Was that fun!! Thanks to Clint for finding this for me and my birthday! Just a quickie shot of the Carlton grain elevator. It's quite a pretty one. I know I know, my shot is crooked. It was a hasty shot taken from the motorbike. And now we are headed home ... along the seaside route, to avoid the heat inland. The bridge in the distance is the Astoria bridge. It is REALLY long and one of my favourites. I think it's quite pretty. On the bridge. It's about 5 km long. You can hardly see the seagull but it was matching our speed along the rail! It looked huge to us! The wind was so strong, that the bird barely had to flap. It was just riding the wind-gusts going along the bridge -- really fast! :) And we are now staying at the Seaquest Motel in South Bend Washington. We go home tomorrow, again coastal route. It will be a lovely ride, but one we've done many times before and I won't likely take any photos. :D
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Look at the odometer in our truck. 300,000 km!!! Clint noticed. Cool. Sorry so blurry; hard to snap a photo in a moving truck while getting in front of driver. LOL OMG, compare the 2 pictures below. Our boat trailer tire did that - not as bad as top pic but worse than bottom pic!! We were half way between Princeton and Keremeos. Minimal cell reception. Argh. We heard a bit of a screeling sound then thwap-thwap-thwap... . We knew what it was immediately and just groaned. The tires were old and we knew they were due, but had just tried to make them last one final summer. Nope nope nope. Argh. We pulled over and I noticed that the fender had actually been ripped right off by the shredding tire. Clint saw the fender back a hundred yards on the highway. So back he ran to get it off the road before someone ran it over and had an accident. Then we commenced phoning tire shops in Keremeos for a fix. No one did on-the-road fixes, so we called Princeton Kal Tire. They came out and had a nasty time getting the wheel off. Broke a lug nut and also dented the wheel. Darn. Anyhow, did finally get the tire changed -- tire $88 ... call-out $100 and $100 an hour. What an expensive mistake on our part. But it could have been so very much worse if we had caused an accident ... or been in one ourselves. We are grateful. Still had to get boat and trailer to Skaha Lake to take Glen and family boating.
Earliest pic is here at top. Start here and scroll down. We were DOWN in that pit just moments before looking around and seeing the action. Now we are above. What a landscape! We are in position, safely, to watch a 'blast'. I know I should be astonished, hurt, angry, enraged about this environmental disaster, but the reclaimed areas are lush and green. Also, I feel better that this grade of coal is used to make steel and not just burned for electricity. Also, the massiveness of the operation ... and the professionality of the company and employees amazes and impresses me. This is the start of the blast. There is a grid of about 100 holes each 15 m deep. Each hole has a 'charge' in it and a bunch of fertilizer. All attached by the blasting wire. In this photo, the white line is the explosion started up the wire from the detonation point and then all the wires in the grid are also going. We could see the blast progress along the wires. It sounded like fireworks going off. Actually, before we heard the sound, we saw the lights ... then our butts were shaken and rumbled ... then the sound arrived. We all "oohed" and "awed" 100X more than for any firework I've ever seen. It was AMAZING! After the white smoke from the blast materials [not TNT, but fertilizer] - then the black smoke puffs up. I am not sure if that's from the explosion or the coal dust. The coal here is very light and powdery. After the black smoke ... comes a final puff of sick-looking yellow-brown smoke. That's poison gas and the mining operation can't restart until all that smoke has cleared and it's been inspected and safe for the miners. [p.s. Photo credits for this blast series goes to Bev. She managed to snap these shots while watching the explosion at the same time. They are amazing! Thanks Bev!] I took video, but Weebly won't let me do videos for free. What a cheapskate I am. Ha ha ha.] This is a water tanker truck. The water used is just the groundwater from the mine site. It is crystal clear - not black or grey. It needs to be removed from the mined area or it would turn into a lake. The water is used to keep the dust down and also on the blades of the drill machine [which drills the blast holes]. LOOK HOW BIG THE WATER TRUCK IS! My cousin Kevin (Dad's sister Viola's youngest son) drives milk truck. Delivers from Creston to Midway where he trades his full trailer for an empty one. The full one is taken to Abbotsford milk and cheese plant. We r meeting up with him. I rode with him for an hour. It was really cool! Not only the truck ride, which I've never had before, but the great visit Kev and I got to have! I am still inside Kevin's truck cab. The silver trailer outside is the milk trailer [full of milk] that Kevin has just released. He pulls the full trailer to Midway then trades it for an empty trailer. He then returns the empty to Creston ... and his trading partner takes the full milk trailer on to its final destination at the Abbotsford milk processing plant [where Clint's friend Andy works. Small world!] This is an internet screen shot of a print Dad & Bev bought me from a gallery in Longview. The gallery is owned by Debra Garside, who lives there. She famously took/takes photos of the wild herd on Sable Island off East Coast here in Canada. Her shots are brilliant! Look at the lips of the darker horse! (This is not a fight shot, I don't think. I believe it's a stallion harassing or disciplining one of his mares). Ps. I wept when they bought it for me. It's just such a gorgeous picture. This is the mountain they are mining above Sparwood. It's a lot smaller than it used to be! Crazy! The coal seam is ON top of the ground. They just dig it up then reseed and reclaim it. But can't rebuild the mountain. You can see a puff of 'smoke' on top. That's actually coal dust rising from a leviathan shovelful of coal being dumped into a giant truck. Just leaving home heading for Kamloops and stay-over at mom's [Aline's]. We took the Fraser Canyon. You can't tell how hot it was; it was nearly 40 deg celsius. I love the tunnels in the Fraser Canyon. After Kamloops, we headed to Canyon Hot Springs to meet up with Dad n Bev. This is just past Revelstoke. Here we are just entering into Canyon Hot Springs resort. It was HELL-a-HOT, by the way. Whew!! Now we've left Canyon Hot Springs and are heading to Sundre Alberta. Here we are passing Dad n Bev. That's their trailer. Love our mountains! Aaaaaah, the grand old Rogers Pass monument. Oh wow! Still super hot! I drowsed on a picnic table. We waited for dad n Bev to fuel up in Canmore, Alberta. Took Hwy 1A from Canmore up to Cochrane and then went north to Sundre. This is some sort of factory. Maybe concrete?
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December 2021
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