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Driving Through the Cascade Mountain Range
My talented son took this photo from the window of our car while we were going 70 mph. Because of my former fulltime job, my traveling was limited to the number of vacation hours that I had during the year. As most of you know from following my blog there is one destination that I would spend my precious vacation hours at, leaving no time to visit anywhere else.
Now that I have switched careers and am writing, I can now visit and write about a larger range of destinations.
At the end of June I was lucky enough to take my first road trip and headed to Western Washington.
Today was spent driving to our destination and took us about 6 hours to get from Lewiston, Idaho to Olympia, Washington.
Of course, there were stops along the way as I wanted to enjoy the sights and with a road trip getting there is a large part of the vacation.
We stopped for the first time in Thorp, Washington at Thorp Fruit and Antique Mall (http://www.thorpfruit.com/). I have seen this place at the side of the road for years, but have always been in too much of a hurry or it was too early in the morning to stop. This trip we were neither
in a hurry and we had left a little later than usual so I exited the freeway to quench my curiosity as to what this place was.
Thorp Fruit and Antique Mall is a very large open building that carries a large variety of interesting items. While it does have fruit at pretty reasonable prices, the other non-produce items that they carry far outnumber the produce. They have a very large selection of wines, teas, baking mixes and other novelty food items. I purchased a bottle of huckleberry syrup, which is something that is not found in very many places.
It was a fun place to stop and I will stop there again to see what else I can find to bring home and make. But, in the way of produce, I think I am going to try the little fruit stand right across the road from them next time.
Once we did reach our destination we enjoyed lunch in Lacey and headed to Tacoma to visit Point Defiance Zoo. Thankfully, I was following my brother who is stationed at Fort Lewis or I would have become lost in the dense traffic we ended up in once
we got to Tacoma. Little did we know Taste of Tacoma was in full swing at the same park that the zoo is located at.
After enough of the crazy traffic it was decided not to go to the zoo and to instead visit the Tacoma Children's Museum in a much quieter part of the city.
The children's museum was fun and had enough to do for all three of the children, even though there was a large age range we were looking at (11, 5, 2). For my eleven-year-old son it was probably at the threshold of what would keep him busy, but with an active imagination he was able to find many things to do.
Would we ever go back? Probably not without my younger neice and nephew.
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