Bragg Family South

After our adventures in the heavily forested mountains northwestern Montana, we made our hotel near Spokane, which is a decidedly drier location.  Since our next location--one that we'd be staying at for a number of days--was the Portland, Oregon area, we needed to head southwesterly across the state of Washington.  To add some variety to our travels, we avoided taking the interstates as much as possible, and instead took smaller highways through more rural parts of the state.  That gave us more chances to stop and enjoy the scenery, such as the river we stopped in the picture above, which wound through a canyon of neat rock formations. As we crossed the dry plains of eastern Washington for several hours, we were continually amazed by the many pockets of irrigated agriculture in this desert-like region, with acre after acre of grains, hay, fruit trees (apples, cherries, etc.), and as we approached the city of Yakima, this strange-looking crop: Beer drinkers may recognize ...

I know I did a blog post only about a week ago, but we've got so many great pictures from our recently completed Great Western Trip '22 that I will have to do several posts to show y'all just a fraction of them...so no point in waiting!  We left Monticello early on a Saturday morning, once Hope and Stephen had return (just hours before) from a 4-H trip to Washington, D.C.  Our destination on this first day--Omaha, Nebraska--was a relatively mild 600 or so mile drive from Monticello, allowing us to make a few stops.  One place we visited was the small city of Carthage, Missouri, home to (amongst other things) a pretty epic county courthouse and a number of monuments related to a Civil War battle that was fought here on July 5, 1861--only a few short months after hostilities commenced: The monument in front of this courthouse is probably not legible in this photograph, but a description here at a nearby local park that was a scene of some of the action noted that the larger...