After a few trips back and forth along I-90, the Auburn Cut-off, and the I-5 gauntlet through Fort Lewis commuting back and forth between Washington and Montana, we are itching to make our trips seem a bit more adventuresome.  That’s a hard task in mid-winter, but today we turned away from I-90 at Ritzville, on WA395 headed toward Pasco.  When we had gotten far enough off I-90 to convince the GPS that we really didn’t want to drive the Interstate all the time, we asked for directions to Yakima, and were rewarded with a diversion on WA 26 to Othello, then WA 24 across the Hanford Reach, the last wild stretch of the Columbia River in the U.S. That put us in Yakima right at dusk, as the GPS switched to night mode as we exited at the motel.  We loaded the cargo tray with enough garden tools and other effects left behind in our move to point the headlights at an annoying angle, so we decided to drive back during daylight hours only, which, in winter, means stretching the 12-hour transit to two days, so we might as well use an alternate, longer route.

We can check the weather and pass conditions in the morning to decide whether to tackle White Pass (US 12) in winter, which we haven’t done before, or run the Ellensburg Canyon back to I-90 and join the traffic rush across Snoqualmie Pass.  We did return to Montana once via White Pass and US 12 last summer when our house-closing trip ran shorter than we planned.  Back when the speed limit was 55mph, we took almost every possible combination of routes between the Seattle area and the Flathead Lake area on our annual vacation trips to Montana, so we’re looking forward to having time to explore those routes again by simply taking a bit more time to detour.  Besides, it saves planning a special trip to revisit scenic places in Washington.