Frump Vacay Part 5: Lovely Eastern Washington

My sister lives in Eastern Washington with her family.

It's generally warmer and drier there, but with the heatwave that was going on at the time just about anywhere we went in the State was hot.

This was a picturesque little farm we passed somewhere near Ellensburg. The farm house was tucked back in a valley between that stand of trees amongst all the wheat.



I hadn't realized so much wheat was grown in the State of Washington. I'd always thought that the vast majority was grown in the Dakotas, which are known for growing the Durum wheat that gets made into pasta.

I love my sister's little farmhouse and the community where they live.



Here is a little guest house/hunting lodge on her property.



The barn.



The acres of lawn.

A picture of Jericho sleeping at dawn. (Yes, twisted halfway off the sofa.)

He and his cousins had stayed up late playing video games and just crashed wherever they fell in sheer exhaustion.



Judah and I rose early, and he tagged along as I went to take farm photos.

This one reminded me of the familiar lyrics, "Oh beautiful for spacious skies..."



We saw lots and lots of this every which way we turned. Truly the "fruited plain".





The sounds of the country were wonderful...kind of a muffled silence, broken only by the sudden hopping of grasshoppers as we approached a nearby field of wheat.

One of my nieces kittens had followed us on our walk, and Judah picked it up just in time for this photo.



The kitten, when released from Judah's clutches, ran up a nearby telephone pole.



This was a velvety meadow we saw on our walk



Here was Judah, running down the road to meet daddy, who was returning from an early morning run.



After we'd been there for a day or two in heat so bad that nobody could even sleep upstairs in the house, we all decided to go to a water park my sister has heard of in Idaho to try and beat the heat.

We arrived before the place opened, and so we had a picnic lunch in a nearby park. Here the boys and my two nieces climb an gigantic old apple tree.



When we finally got to the water park, my niece dropped her towel to run for the water and I noticed she'd drawn on herself.

"What is that", I asked curiously, not quite making out what it was.

In her sweet, shy way she replied with a giggle, "A six-pack".



Because I'd suffered a recent sunburn, I spent most of the day beneath these ginormous umbrellas.

Daddy and Cousin E took turns taking Judah out in the water to play.



And play they did. There was so much to do there!



Jericho and his "six pack" cousin spent most of the day on these waterslides.



My other niece spent a considerable amount of time entertaining Judah in the kiddie pools.



In spite of the heat, the kids still came back from time to time to dry off in the sun.



Jericho was eager to try out this large, floating obstacle course...which, as the children were permitted to cross it one at a time, was made kind of tricky because lifeguards stood there with a what looked like a small firehose spraying down the course.

It made things a lot more challenging as the inflated vinyl was super-slippery and many slid into the large pool.



This is one of the many pools the park had to offer.



Judah made several friends during the course of the day.



The kids played until they were exhausted, and we headed back to my sister's place.

Later that evening, I captured this image of Goat Girl.



My niece's little goats follow her around like a couple of loyal puppies.

This is their older cat, who has taken refuge in the barn since the arrival of the kittens.

Judging by the offerings she left on the porch, there was no shortage of prey for her to hunt down in there.



Here, Piggy and Oats, those cute litle goats, creep curiously up to my camera.



"Maaa-aa-aah-ma" they plead, nudging the can of grain.





The girls dogs are curious about the goats, but have learned to keep their distance. Goats put up a pretty good fight!



Here was an image I captured just before dark one night.



Another I'd captured just before dusk another night. A 7 point buck.

There were many deer in the area, and we finally had to cap off Judah's 1 buck-per-deer game. He'd racked up some serious doe dough.





The last morning we were there, Piggy and Oats once again escaped their pen. They were wily goats. Goats that wanted to romp freely with the dogs. Which they probably could do if it weren't for the packs of coyotes wandering the farm by night.



We tried to reinforce it as best we could.



In the process, it was discovered that there were a couple of dead field mice in the goats watering trough.

Naturally Judah caught wind of this and begged to go see them.



Apparently we've deprived him of this aspect of life, because he kept going back again and again to see them.

Jericho loved that his cousins had so many pets.



I loved that the kids had so much fun cousin-time together out there in beautiful, serene farm country.