Adler's Fall 2013 Northwest: Oct. 2, 2013

Oct. 2, 2013

This is our last day at Coulee City, so we followed Banks Lake up to Grand Coulee to see the dam. This area reminds me of Big Bend, but I like this better. The dam supplies power to Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and western Montana, and it took 17 years to build it, between 1933 - 1950. Presidents, FDR and Truman were in office at that time, but FDR was instrumental in starting the dam project. It was a time when he wanted to put the nation back to work, and thousands of people worked on this dam project. When FDR’s wife, Eleanor visited this desert area at the beginning of construction, she was quoted as saying, ‘It was a good salesman that sold this to Franklin.” We also checked out the Steamboat Rock State Park. We are finding that the state parks in WA are beautiful and the sites for RV’s are very nice. We talked to the ranger there, and bought a yearly pass to admit us into any state park in WA State for the rest of this year. We only plan to be in WA for the month of October, but we’ll more than make it worth the cost of it. There are so many state parks along the coastline of WA and we will be checking into them for our campgrounds. They always have such interesting things there, and many hiking trails. We wanted to visit Olympia National Park, but unless the government shutdown ends by then, we will be glad that we have the state parks to explore. We are, however, hoping that the shutdown is settled by the time we get to the Redwoods and Yosemite! We found a few geo-caches, and came back to Coulee City, as the rains that moved in curtailed our activities. We leave tomorrow for Leavenworth, WA and Oktoberfest there this weekend.