July 15, 2021

Kennewick, Richland, and Pasco make up the Tri-Cities, with a metropolitan area of about 280,000.

Our first full day of exploring took us to Badger Mountain Park.

The confluence of the Yakima and Columbia Rivers from Badger Mountain
The earth cache we completed was about these volcanic rocks.
We don’t have any information about these whimsically-painted pieces of road equipment.

We visited a memorial made from 35-foot tall external vertical support columns from the World Trade Center.

The basalt columns on the left are meant to suggest the World Trade Center buildings.

At one time or another during our visit we crossed these two pretty bridges over the Columbia River.

We don’t seek out restaurants featured on television, but were very pleased with the quality of the food at Porter’s Real Barbecue. Then we discovered it had been on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. [Sorry about the reflections.]

We found some other interesting caches while in the Tri-Cities. At one, a former teacher had placed fun, decorative items around his yard, created a free library where any child could take a book, and developed a two-stage (multi) cache based on the cartoon character Tweetie Bird.

Adventure Labs are multi-site caches built around a theme. We completed one where we visited five sculptures and were challenged to find which of six possible thieves had stolen a valuable painting. At each site we were introduced to one of the suspects, told what he might be wearing as a disguise, and what weapon he might have used. It was an interesting combination of the game “Clue” and geocaching. Identifying the thief wasn’t too hard–we were given confirmed alibis for five of the six suspects and so only had to figure out the one with no alibi. The container holding the logbook was one of our all-time favorites. Who’s going to mess with the U.S. Department of GeoData?

Smoke from fires in the area colored the rising moon orange.

Categories: Travel

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.