On the Road~~~Again!

Last Friday, a beautifully sunny day, instead of going to see this little guy,

 
we hopped in the car and drove over Snoqualmie Pass and headed for a part of Washington we'd not yet explored.

We stopped at a viewpoint on the road to Yakima. Isn't is amazing what a little water can do?

Our destination was Kennewick, one of the Tri-Cities, and we arrived in time to do a bit of looking around as well as checking out a yarn shop called Sheep's Clothing. (I was quite restrained.....only bought ONE ball of pink yarn as we'd just found out our niece is having a girl and a pair of cute RED dpns.) We also found a neat road through a park along the Columbia River.

Here we saw lots of Canadian geese, some of whom were wearing collars. Don't they look uncomfortable?

What we thought from a distance were little piles of debris turned out to be goslings, lots and lots of them. I stopped counting at 35! And we saw three more groups of geese and lots more babies further down the road. It would appear that this species is doing very well! Later that evening when we came back to the same spot, they were all GONE, hiding somewhere I suppose.

The next day we decided to follow the river instead of retracing our original route back home. That took us to this spot where the Snake River joins the Columbia and where there used to be a fort.

Here was another interesting monument and a good view of the Columbia River.

The highway and the railroad tracks curved and crossed the river, following the road along those huge cliffs at the left and  continuing on into Oregon where we  enjoyed some really pretty scenery in the Columbia Gorge. It was also interesting to see two very busy train lines, one on each side of the river.

We could have crossed over the river to the Washington side on this bridge but decided to continue on through the Gorge to I-5 past Multnomah Falls. It was beautiful and busy, so we didn't get a photo unfortunately.

Had we stopped at the Falls, this is what we would have seen.  This photo was taken in May of 2010 after Catherine and Brent's wedding.  And as for Max, we saw him on Monday and will play with him again tomorrow!