Day 55 - Walla Walla, WA to Umatilla, OR

Lowden is A tiny hamlet about 10 miles west of Wala Walla that has fallen on hard times for the past many years.

But in the past few years that has all changed And it is continuing to change at a rapid pace. The saying around here is: Buy Your wine in Walla Walla; by ear auto parts in Napa. Grapes are a far more lucrative crap these days than a week and you cannot swing a cat in The Walla Walla area without hitting a vineyard, a winery or a wine tasting room.

Meet Jeremy and his daughter Batman. (don’t call her bat woman. There is an Adam west day in Walla Walla and she knows that he was not a woman.)

Jeremy and bat man live in a house that they rent in Lowden. But they are going to have to move. Their landlord sold the house to a winery that is going to convert it into a wine tasting room.

The Louis and Clark trail guide book and some blogs that I track were Published in 2004 or 2005, when the nation was celebrating the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. They make no mention whatsoever of wineries in this region. And this is all happened in the past decade.

They do mention that this is a great onion growing region and that I could expect to find and smell onions on the side of the road. That has not changed.

I am passing into Oregon, The 11th and final state I will pass through on this trip. I also have met up with the Columbia River, the fourth and final river that Lewis and Clark travel upon. This region is known as the scab lands because of rock outcroppings from and otherwise they are in landscape.

Perhaps the biggest floods ever to take place on the planet earth were the floods from the melting of ice on glacial Lake Missoula between 15,000 and 18,000 years ago.That formed what today is known as the Wallula Gap, through which floodwaters raged at speeds of up to 60 mph.

I met a couple from London who are on a four month trip through the United States and Canada. In their research they identified this as one of the top 15 or 20 things that they wanted to see. I for some reason had never heard of this until today.

I have been giving some thought to extending my trip slightly to cycle down the Oregon coast a bit and then loop back to Portland. Today the road crew sent me a message about that.

Speaking of road crews, I didn’t know exactly what to make of this sign, but I did not expect it was good news.

It wasn’t.