Choose Your Own Adventure

I've lived here 18 months now and I've only really seen the area surrounding Seattle. I've driven around a little bit to Portland, and the Olympics and such but I haven't really explored the state that much. In order to remedy the situation I decided to drive around choose your own adventure style. That involved sending some text messages of 1,2, or 3 and 1 or 2. It worked pretty well and I saw of the state I haven't seen before. Decision one was North, South, or East... Vancouver, Portland, or Eastern Washington. I ended up going East and a few different people contributed to the route shown below.


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It was a lot of driving but I understand a little bit about Central Washington that I didn't understand before. I forgot to bring a camera but coming into Yakima is great with two huge mountains just hanging out in the background. The fact the area is basically a desert is hard to appreciate when compared to the other side of the Cascades. The most interesting thing I picked up was the enormous area on the map fenced off and listed as US department of Energy. I grew up next to missile silo's and military installations of various sorts but this was a new one. A little research on Wikipedia tells me it is the Hanford Site. I would call this one of the great unknowns that you don't learn unless you drive around a little bit. The Hanford Site was part of the Manhattan project and created most of the Plutonium and enriched Uranium for the Nuclear tests and later the nuclear fuel for most the of the weapons in the US arsenal. They give 48 tours a year and I'd be really interested to see what it looks like. It is also one the of the largest contamination sites in the US.

It's crazy to think they used to perform nuclear tests only 50-70 miles away from Vegas back in the 50's. I wonder what is happening now that in 20 years will be a known carcinogen or known as being extremely unhealthy/dangerous... I'm voting Red Bull and/or energy drinks in general.

Rachel voted for 201 stories. I'm going to tell the very first 201 story.

It was June of '99 and school was just over and we were allowed to move into our off campus apartment. That apartment was 6 guys living together - Mike, Jay, Alex, Andy, John, and me. That first weekend we decided to throw a party to celebrate the escape from the tyranny of the dorms. Hall Monitors and RA's be damned for their rules. After a fair amount of haggling and negotiating we managed to secure a 1/4 of Busch Light and we threw our first party. There are tons of details that are blending together but we ended up with orange construction barrels, people on the roof out of 3 story building, loud music, a water ballon launcher, and general shenanigans. Believe it or not but Milwaukee's finest ended up at our apartment after a while asking lots of questions. So the very first weekend we lived in our place the cops showed up and I had my name on file with MPD. No tickets were issued and no one got in trouble but we had to take the construction barrels back to where they came from. That was the first of many parties at 201 and they memories go on from there.