Soaking Wet in Washington

Washington turned out to be quite a strange place. From the Columbia there were mountains and cliffs leading to the water just like the in Oregon, but as soon as we made it up the steep incline through the mountains, I did not expect what I saw. It was a complete plateau of flat land, almost as flat as any land in Nebraska. It was also kept impeccably clean as noted by the “If you litter, it will hurt” sign. We wondered what that meant. The rest of the day was spent driving through endless vineyards and orchards, with no signs of large civilization anywhere. What did surprise me was the prevalent Latin America presence. I shouldn’t be surprised, what with all the orchards around.

The real fun came the next day, when we got a load taking us to a city south of Seattle. That morning I awoke to find that we were stuck on a mountain. Snoqualmie pass, to be exact.

It seems that they were doing something called avalanche prevention, where they blow excess snow off the mountain. Now you have to understand, being from Georgia this has been quite an education in snow for me and boy this pass has been the largest lesson of all. Stuck in back to back trucker traffic, everyone was out in the snow putting on chains. It’s a nasty business, crawling around under your truck in this brownish icy sludge to lock freezing cold chains on wet tires. I watched bleary eyed as men hunched down in everything from boots to slippers attempting to get the job done as soon as possible. Its truly in these moments where you see good things in people, as truckers helped others with their chains. We had a very nice FedEx man behind us who apparently does this route often and even gave James a few tips to help him along.

After almost two hours things eased up and we tip toed our way through the pass onto Seattle. The rest of the day went downhill from there as the infamous Seattle drizzle came down.

Our stop ended up being a load of beer to a distribution center for Anheuser Busch that looked like beer mecca. It was one of the cleanest places I’ve seen with scrubbed shiny floors and neatly wall to wall wrapped boxes awaiting delivery. Think of walking into a Home Depot but instead of tools its beer. They even had a complete room just for kegs. James found out the place had quite a variety of drink, most of it on its way to Alaska.

From our little trek in the snow to our emergency stop that afternoon, most of our clothes got soaked leaving us the only option of putting up make shift clotheslines in the truck to attempt and dry out things. Our emergency stop basically meant that once the delivery was made we had run out of time to make it to a truck stop and had to make due with the back of a Kmart parking lot surrounded by shops. The upside to all this was we got to walk to this little hole in the wall Chinese restaurant, cold, wet and hungry enough to eat a horse. It was some of the best chicken fried rice I’ve ever had, second only to Cathy Ho’s in Carrollton. After a good long nap I woke up feeling a litter warmer and a little more alive and made my way to a McDonald’s nearby which has turned out to be a haven to me on these trips. Open at all hours, sweet tea reminiscent of the south and free Wifi make it the best thing on the road. I asked the workers how they dealt with the rain and their response was simply, “it’s Washington,” as if that explained it all. I ended up staying up all night at that McDonald’s nursing a good hot chocolate and catching up with messages online.

It took us the better part of two days and a laundry visit to get all our clothes dried and back to normal.

You better believe I was excited to hear the next load was to take us to Massachusetts. But more on that next time.