As planned, we left Charbonneau Park Thursday morning and made a short drive a few miles downriver to Hood Park. Check-out time at Charbonneau was noon, so we took our time getting ready to roll and pulled out just after 11:30am. At Hood Park, we weren’t allowed to check in until 2pm. I used the downtime to dump the gray water tank at their dumpstation, then we parked in the lower lot to have lunch and kill some time.

Across the Snake River from Hood Park is the Tri-Cities Grain Company. Trucks offload wheat there where it’s transferred to barges. They had an unbelievable pile of grain out in the open alongside the grain elevators. It was by far the largest pile of grain I’ve ever seen. I’m curious as to why it’s piled up out in the open like that.

We checked in promptly at 2pm and drove to site 20. Donna was driving the Nissan Frontier and following me – I didn’t bother hooking up the tow bar for such a short journey. We didn’t have the view we had at Charbonneau, but we had a spacious, quiet site.

This is another Corps of Engineers park, just like Charbonneau and again I paid $12/night for 50-amp electrical service. There are a few other COE parks nearby along the Snake River. We were only staying for one night, we had reservations in Walla Walla, Washington next where we would be on full hook-ups.

There were more pleasure boats on this section of the Snake River than were out above the Ice Harbor Lock and Dam. I also saw a few barges heading upriver that had to stage and wait for the locks to open and lift them up to the next water level behind the dam. After offloading grain, the barges carry fertilizers and fuels back upriver. There’s always conflict between environmentalists that want to do away with dams, locks and barges and farmers and merchants that rely on the barge system to move goods.

The dams create hydro-electric power for the regions and also keep the shipping lanes at a minimum of 14 feet deep. The barges can draft about 10 feet fully loaded. Without the barge system, a lot more trucks would have to be on the road and railroad infrastructure would require a lot of upgrading. I don’t see it going away anytime soon.

We had another leisurely morning on Friday. Our destination, Blue Valley RV Park in Walla Walla, was only 52 miles away and wouldn’t take much over an hour to reach. We pulled out of Hood Park around 11:30am and went back upriver on WA124 which took us northeast, then east through farmland. As we moved away from the river, we left the fruit growers behind and saw nothing but wheat fields for miles.

At the junction with WA125, we turned south and WA125 took us into Walla Walla. As we approached town from the north, we drove right past the Washington State Penitentiary – also known as Walla Walla State Penitentiary. It houses over 2,400 prisoners including some of the most notorious in the northwest. The Hillside Strangler, Kenneth Bianchi, is there and also Gary Ridgeway, a mass murderer of women known as the Green River Killer. There are many more dangerous mass murders serving life sentences there.

We found the RV park next to the Veterans Memorial Golf Course. The park is paved and has well-kept landscaping. The sites are all back-in only, but have plenty of room. We’re in site 8 which was easy to navigate. The only downside to this end of the park is it backs up against a dairy distributor. Late yesterday afternoon, a truck dropped a refrigerated trailer that I think is filled with ice cream in the lot. The reefer unit runs almost constantly – you can hear the generator run at full power for several seconds – at times maybe up to a minute – then it drops to idle speed for no more than a second before it revs up again. It became annoying in the night.

We took a drive through town and bought a few things at the Walmart which is west of Walla Walla and actually in a town called College Place. You wouldn’t know it’s a different town as the neighborhoods run together. Donna picked up a ribeye steak and I grilled it for dinner. She served it covered in sauteed mushrooms with patty pan squash sauteed with onions, garlic and rosemary and a spud on the side. A simple, delicious meal for less than $10/plate.

We woke up to rain this morning. It rained sporadically until about 10 am, then it quit. The skies remained overcast and it was only about 63 degrees outside. I put on jeans and boots – I’ve worn nothing but shorts and filp-flops on all but a few occasions this summer. We drove downtown to the farmers’ market on Main Street.

We found some excellent locally grown produce there.

One of the things we’ve really come to like this summer are donut peaches. Donut peaches have many names – most common are donut, flat peach and saturn peach. They originated in China but were introduced to the US. Most of the commercially available donut peaches are grown in California, but they are fairly common in the northwest. They are easy to break in half to remove the pit. I like to cut it into thin slices and add them to cereal. They are great in cottage cheese as well. The name donut or flat peach comes from the flattened shape.

After shopping the market, we took a walk through downtown on five blocks of Main Street. There were a number of eateries with street-side dining and boutique shops. Many local wineries were represented with tasting rooms, shops and even restaurants. Most of the winery shops were on the north side of Main Street.

We may head back to town and check out some of the wines this afternoon.

Today’s high temperature should be in the mid-70s. Tomorrow we can expect it to be a little warmer. We’ll pull out of here tomorrow and head south into Oregon. Where we’ll stop next is undecided at this point, but we’ll figure it out.

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