An autumn drive through central Washington!

Two tanks of gas, 17 hours of driving and 600 miles.

We left a little before 4am for our day trip to central Washington! Eric drove the first 2 hours of the trip…and I slept for most of that 2 hours!

We planned the trip so that we would begin exploring the areas we plotted out to explore when the sun came up! Here’s Dry Coulee!

The drive through Dry Coulee was on a mostly dirt road. Actually most of the roads we were on yesterday were dirt roads. We seriously put my Toyota Yaris to the test! I’ve taken that thing off roading through sage brush, on beaches and through sandy deserts in central WA!…and we’re not done yet!

Summer Falls State Park. We were the only people there which was rather peaceful! This was actually one of my favorite spots of the day! This was our first time here and I’d love to come back for a picnic in the summer!

Fall is here! In the Seattle area you’re mostly surrounded by pine trees so you don’t really have the fun leaf colors of fall! It was nice to see some yellow and red trees.

Old homestead.

Leaning barn. My camera was pulling out some wonderful blues in the sky!

Just a small broken down town.

Honk!

We were driving on this old road when a truck came up behind me rather quickly. I’ll pulled over to let him go through. The kind men in the truck stopped…”Are you trackin’, or broken down, or lost?” “Nope…just driving around!”

An old schoolhouse. There are actually quite a few old homesteads, barns and schools in this part of the state. If you’re lucky enough to not be on the interstate you’re bound to see some!

The last golden field of summer.

Down there is the Columbia River.

After driving down that fun road to the Columbia River you had to take a small ferry to get to the other side! The ferry was free and could only haul about 6 cars at a time! How fun is that?!

There were 5 cars on the ferry when we took it. They go back and forth all day transporting cars. It was actually kind of fun to be on such a small ferry.

The water was calm and the sun was shining! We were lucky and had a sunny 70 degree day.

Bo’sn stown.

Columbia River.

There were only two cars waiting to take the ferry to the other side!

We had lunch at a nearby State Park. It was a great idea for us to buy a small camp stove for our travels. It’s nice to actually eat a meal (of Indian food!!) rather than just snack on food throughout the day.

One other couple was at the park with us, but again it was a quiet place to be.

There’s an overlook at the Coulee City Dam. There’s this weird structure there too.

Damn dam.

We drove through Barker Canyon to get to Banks Lake. Banks Lake exists because of the dam.

More fall leaves!

Eric with one of his many film cameras. Note Steamboat rock in the background.

Fun Barker Canyon sign!

And this is Barker Canyon!

We made a friend on the way out of the canyon.

Just munching on some prickly weeds!

That cow was mud bogging!

The desert is quite lovely this time of year! The dry grass is such a great color.

Most of the farm animals  we encounter on these backroads are on open ranges so we get very close to them because they are usually literally right on the road. They always seem to be curious of us and I’m always almost ready to dig some apples out of the snack bag for them.

If you look very closely you can see Eric standing in front of that huge rock!

Yeager rock!

Eric picked a flower for me!

We both take photos with vintage Polaroid Land cameras. Fuji makes film that works in them which is great!…but when you peal the exposed photo away from the negative you have two wet pieces of film that have to dry. This has been a problem until we figured out a solution for ourselves! We huge a line with some paper clips on it over the back seat of the car! This was out first time testing it out and it was a success!

This was probably the worst road we’ve every driven on. We were way far out in the desert when the road suddenly turned to sand. Yaris= ATV.

At the end of the road we were greeted by a better road and Moses Coulee!

You would expect this scenery in Arizona or Utah, but no, we’re in Washington!

Somewhere out there is the ghost town of Spencer. A few years ago Eric, our friend Calder, and an older gentleman that Eric is friends with, and myself hiked out there to find Spencer! We found it along with broken bottles, plates and pieces of an old stove!

And don’t think I’d forget to have at least one photo of our travel mascot!

A lovely old ad on an old barn!

We get dirty and we have a great time doing it! Happy and safe travels!