One of the camping locations that we really enjoy going back to is on the banks of the Yakima River that runs through the Yakima River Valley. So after spending a couple of weeks at the Yakima Elks
(which is a great site to pull the coach into…) and enjoying Leslee’s family (Lena, Vinny, and Leslee) we went down to the river for another week. This is BLM land so our expenses topped out at $10 a night. On the second day, we drove off to see a waterfall that we read about last year in National Geographic. Palouse Falls is a waterfall that drops 183 feet and came to our attention when a kayaker decided to take the plunge off the top for a “World Record” and came out of the water wet and suffering a broken PADDLE. Well that lasted a whole 2 weeks… It seems that his record was broken twice in a month, with the standing record somewhere about 200+ feet. Well for those that haven’t had the pleasure of visiting “The Palouse” in the state of Washington, I should mention that most of it is land that is farmed on rolling hills that not too many years ago was nothing but sagebrush and rattlesnakes. The falls have been cut through solid rock over many centuries and seem to have come out of no-where coming from a small creek
that soon flows into the Columbia River some miles downstream. After spending about 1 ½ hours at the top of the falls, and a short hike, we continue our drive. We stopped off a very small town called Starbuck for a great lunch. The restaurant was one of those little “Mom and Pop” places, but this Mom and Pop want to sell out and retire. 7 days a week, 12 hours a day is getting “too much” for them so all we could do was wish them all the luck in finding a buyer for this out of the way eatery and continue on our way. Well with seeing and enjoying the Palouse Falls and having a great lunch at Mom and Pop’s, I saw one more thing that excited me…(although I didn’t get a picture of them), I saw my very first “Longhorn” steer. These horns were so HUGE that it was hard to imagine that they were real, but real they were. Next time I will have my camera.