a day in The Dalles
A couple of weeks ago, I got a shipment of some products that a big company is thinking of selling. I gave them my opinion and they mailed me a check for a hundred bucks. It came yesterday and I told Kevin we would be having a good dinner tonight!
When it came time to leave town, I asked if he wanted to go east or west. We chose to avoid Portland and instead headed east on Washington 14, the Cascade Highway. I felt a mixture of emotions as we talked about what we have and what we want.
The surroundings here really are just astonishingly beautiful, but the place is isolated and relatively ill-supplied. To get to a decent grocery or restaurant where neither of us works is at least a 50-mile round trip, with no end in sight to gas price rises. We have a good life here, on the surface of it: decent house, decent income, decent jobs, decent transportation... a decent mainstream consumerist life, albeit the somewhat simplified version. *shrug* So why do we seem, still, held at arm's length by almost everyone here? Though I was invited to go back dancing at the Eagles again, I really don't know anyone here yet. The boss did tell me it took him 7 years to be accepted, but, shit! I don't want to feel this separate for that long!
The kicker is: would Spokane (or anywhere else) be any different?
Anyway, we went to an early lunch at this marvelous French bakery in The Dalles. They had a delicious cream of cauliflower soup, which I had with a delightful bacon/pepper cheese/turkey/tomato grilled sandwich on exemplary bread. I had to buy some croissants to bring home. Then we walked around a bit through what, it seems, is the furniture district in The Dalles. Quite against our expectations, we found a knockdown tall dining table and four chairs for $300 and snagged it. We're putting it all together now.
Embarq's toll-free number said this morning that customers in Washington and Oregon might experience loss of service as they upgraded their network. And we did -- which is why we got up and out as early as we did!
When it came time to leave town, I asked if he wanted to go east or west. We chose to avoid Portland and instead headed east on Washington 14, the Cascade Highway. I felt a mixture of emotions as we talked about what we have and what we want.
The surroundings here really are just astonishingly beautiful, but the place is isolated and relatively ill-supplied. To get to a decent grocery or restaurant where neither of us works is at least a 50-mile round trip, with no end in sight to gas price rises. We have a good life here, on the surface of it: decent house, decent income, decent jobs, decent transportation... a decent mainstream consumerist life, albeit the somewhat simplified version. *shrug* So why do we seem, still, held at arm's length by almost everyone here? Though I was invited to go back dancing at the Eagles again, I really don't know anyone here yet. The boss did tell me it took him 7 years to be accepted, but, shit! I don't want to feel this separate for that long!
The kicker is: would Spokane (or anywhere else) be any different?
Anyway, we went to an early lunch at this marvelous French bakery in The Dalles. They had a delicious cream of cauliflower soup, which I had with a delightful bacon/pepper cheese/turkey/tomato grilled sandwich on exemplary bread. I had to buy some croissants to bring home. Then we walked around a bit through what, it seems, is the furniture district in The Dalles. Quite against our expectations, we found a knockdown tall dining table and four chairs for $300 and snagged it. We're putting it all together now.
Embarq's toll-free number said this morning that customers in Washington and Oregon might experience loss of service as they upgraded their network. And we did -- which is why we got up and out as early as we did!