Showing posts with label winter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label winter. Show all posts

Friday, January 6, 2017

END OF THE ROAD


In an otherwise grey winter day, a little bit of color stands out.


As for the title, that refers to the snow-covered dirt road at right. Just over the hill in the distance, 
the road takes a sharp turn to the right. Suddenly the snow is much deeper 
as it is clear no vehicles had dared to venture further up the hill. 
So I carefully backed down into what appeared to be a flat pull out, 
only to have the rear of my SUV become stuck on an unseen hump along the shoulder. 

Hmmm . . . what now? 

Fortunately, only minutes later another adventuresome person came upon me 
and helped guide me in my vehicle further back past the hump. 
The idea was to have room to get up speed to send me up and over the hump. 
It worked! 







Monday, February 1, 2016

MORE COFFEE TO GO-GO

Dutch Bros. Coffee

This privately held drive-through coffee chain is headquartered in Grants Pass, Oregon.
At last count a total of 233 company-owned and franchise stores are located in seven states in the western USA. 
The Walla Walla store has been open for over four years.


Dutch Bros. was founded on February 3, 1992 by brothers Dane and Travis Boersma, third-generation dairy farmers in Grants Pass. 
They bought an espresso machine and experimented with a hundred pounds of coffee in their empty milk house.


After a month of handing out free samples to friends and family, the brothers began serving up mochas and lattes 
from a pushcart set up in downtown Grants Pass. They named their company 
Dutch Brothers Coffee Company, or Dutch Bros.


Over the next few years, permanent kiosks opened in other parts of Grants Pass, 
including a coffeehouse a few blocks from the original stand.


Dutch Bros. roasts all their own coffee, a three-bean blend sourced from 
direct relationships with plantations in El Salvador, Brazil and Colombia.


Flavored coffee drinks are made from ingredients such as Torani syrups, 
a blend of Dutch chocolate milk, Oregon Chai, Pacific soy milk, and Harney & Sons teas.

In October 2009, co-founder Dane Boersma died of Lou Gehrig's disease. 
In his honor, all locations annually donate one designated day's proceeds 
to the Muscular Distrophy Association.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

EMPIRE BUILDER ANTIQUES-What's Left


Yesterday's photo piqued interest in this closed and boarded up antique store. A look on Google provided no viable information to add to the story. So more pictures of this old train car will have to suffice.







The End

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

A WINDOW OF ANOTHER SORT

Empire Builder 1293


There is an old Empire Builder train car in Walla Walla that was once used as part of an antique store. The store has been closed for years, despite still being filled with old things, and is in a state of severe disrepair due to vandalism. Apparently the owner does not want to sell the items inside or the train car, so it sits with windows busted or boarded up awaiting the fate of time.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

WINDOW in 5 Variations

I have a "thing" about windows. When I travel to Europe, I take hundreds, perhaps even thousands of photos of windows--in houses, apartment buildings, shops, out buildings, wherever. But somehow, when I return home, there seem to be fewer interesting windows to photograph. So it has become my personal challenge to find windows that have that je ne sais quoi that calls out to me to take a picture. 

Here is a window that caught my eye as I wandered down a nondescript alley in Walla Walla. The first photo is the original, tuned for prime time viewing on this blog. The other four photos are variations, the result of my experimentation with post-processing apps that can turn a standard realistic photo into a more artistic version.







Wednesday, January 13, 2016

PALOUSE FALLS IN JANUARY

Artifacts of the Ice Age

Palouse Falls is the only major year-round waterfall remaining from the Ice Age floods that carved this landscape thousands of years ago. 

The falls plunge approximately 198 feet over layers of exposed basalt that make up the Palouse River Canyon.



Saturday, January 9, 2016