The Beautiful Palouse

Colleen and I just returned from our four-day fall birthday trip to southeastern Washington. The Palouse country is beautiful most any time of the year, but I think fall is my favorite with the stubble fields and the winter wheat green fields forming a patchwork quilt across Whitman County.

We revisited several shops that we found last year, but our B&B experience was just that .... an experience.

It was a ranch located between Colfax and Pullman and our host and hostess were a husband and wife of retirement age who have partially retired from farming but have plenty of other interests. Their home was a perfect layout for a B&B with a full daylight basement that afforded four bedrooms and two bathrooms, but I don't think these folks have really considered what a B&B should offer besides a bed, a bathroom, and a breakfast.

Colleen's and my room had obviously been the family room when the house was built and it came complete with a fireplace and a bar. But it looked as if this also became the catch-all over the years since it sported a French provincial china cabinet adorned with a two-foot tall Father Christmas standing guard from the top. Draped across an old trunk was a saddle and bridle, and the chaps were hanging from the fireplace mantle which was adorned with an imitation evergreen tree.

Colleen got the special bedside table that was adorned with a feathery, sequined, two foot long blue peacock that our hostess said she just had to have and waited for it to go on sale.

When we got a glimpse of the birdcage the size of a small refrigerator with a foot tall parrot sitting on its outside edge, we declared that we were not breakfast eaters so no need to prepare breakfast for us. Because the bird and cage were located right at the end of the stand-along eating bar in the kitchen and adjacent to the dining table. Ugh.

These folks were very nice, have been ranchers all their lives, and so I suspect they didn't have any sense of anything being amiss. I just wonder how they have stayed under the radar of the local health department.

Saturday was homecoming for WSU so we avoided the stadium area, but the day before we found a fruit sale where the school was selling its apples and pears. We found at least a dozen kinds of apples that we have never heard of so considered that quite a find. Moscow has a great Farmer's Market on Saturday mornings so we found lovely peppers and squash among other things, but we shopped very quickly because the overnight temperature had been 15, and it had not warmed up very much by 8:30.

The little town of Palouse is becoming quite a tourist gem. There are three antique shops with two of them being very inviting, a nice little quilt shop, and the Green Frog restaurant serves up some very tasty food. We shared a bowl of homemade soup, a black bean burrito that looked and acted more like a lasagne, and spinach salad. All very tasty and yummy. The shopkeepers were lamenting that there is no place for visitors to stay in Palouse so I'm thinking that might be my call for a bed and breakfast. No need to worry about competition from the ranch over by Colfax/Pullman!!

Colleen and I saw Mike and Mary and Becky and Ben while we were there and all are doing well. Mike is not supposed to ride in a car for long periods of time, but he seems to be getting a bit of cabin fever.

We spent two of our four nights at the Sprague RV park/B&B/canning kitchen. Colleen made apple butter after we returned from down south on Saturday afternoon. Rod is still working at the jobsite at Vantage, so Karen is busy trying to keep ahead of the freezing weather and to winterize everything. This early cold snap makes me think more and more of sunny Arizona. Ciao