I can hardly believe that June is almost over. We are still in Yakima, Washington. Still house/pet sitting for David and Monica. They return on July 2nd and we will be leaving on July 3rd, heading for the west coast. We have been spending our days exploring Yakima and the surrounding valleys. We bought some fresh cherries from an orchard heading into town – they are delicious! Have been steadily picking (and eating) raspberries every day. We’ve been walking up and down the roads of the neighborhood in the evenings. It has been cooler the past couple of days – cool enough to open the windows at night. This is a very dry, desolate place if it is not under irrigation. All the homes have small patches of grass that are watered daily. Then the rest of the property is rock or just dry, dead grass. So why is this valley the number one producer of such a variety of produce? It’s the soil – loess – the same thing we saw in the hills of Iowa, except here it is the silt from volcanic ash that settled in the valleys. The orchards and vineyards are all on hills, rows and rows and rows of trees or vines. Peaches are supposed to be ready next week. Between Bozeman and here, a big truck passed us and a rock cracked our windshield, so we got it repaired yesterday. Nice to not have a growing crack running across it! We discover new places every day – we will take a road and end up winding through a canyon and sometimes we come back out at a place we know and sometimes we don’t. Good thing trucks have reverse and can turn around! We are really enjoying the housesitting opportunities – we get to really “know” a place. Yakima is nice, but I wouldn’t want to live here. It is too dry and it has gotten hot some days – in the 90’s, although that is not typical highs. And it usually cools down at night – we picked raspberries and walked last night around 8:30 and it was actually cool. We’ve been trying to get a picture of the quail here – they are the ones with the little curlycue topnotch. They are too fast! We will keep trying.
GA Gypsies - Fulltiming 