what about the plastic animals?

Recreation

Greatest downtown bowling alley storefront ever?  I hadn't planned on stopping in The Dalles, Oregon but one glance at this place changed my mind.  In the background is the grand but closed Granada Theatre.  I took a peak in there too.

Four More From Yakima

I better return to my trip or I'll never get done putting up all the pictures (if you follow the Flickr links you'll see that I'm still putting up photos from last year's trip to Iowa and Nebraska).  There's no real connection between the four photos above other than they're from Yakima and I liked them.

Yakima was sort of interesting, sort of not.  It's the "big city" of Washington's wine and fruit region.  There were also enough anti-drug billboards around town to lead me to believe the Yakima area has a meth problem.  I believe the bottom photo is the county jail.  It is across the street from a nice coffeehouse where I enjoyed a pastry and a chai and wrote a few postcards.

Completely unrelated:  For reasons I can not yet reveal I was browsing the Wikipedia entries for small towns in central Illinois this evening.  The entry for Gillespie (pop. 3,412) had this important tidbit (see the last line):

Fortuitously I grabbed a screen shot as that line was soon deleted.

Wet Paint Is Wet

In case you were wonder if wet paint was really wet. 

Yakima Sports Center

Above a bar in Yakima.  It was duck season.

 

The Lariat

There were lots of great old neon signs in Yakima.  That's one advantage of having 300 days of sunshine a year and almost no snow.

The Lariat's sign was so good I had to stop for dinner.  The cheeseburger didn't live up to expectations based on the sign but when they say "Yakima's Original Big Ones" they mean it!  I think it contained at least a half-pound of beef.  The cost couldn't be beat.  Per ounce the cheeseburger was less than half the price of a Shackburger.

More From Ellensburg

The Thunderbird Motel sign is one of the first sights you seen when approaching Ellensburg from the north.  That was literally and figuratively a good sign.  Every Labor Day weekend Ellensburg hosts the largest rodeo in Washington.  The town also has a very small Sears.  Are there many of those left?

That Grand Central sign in the last photo had me perplexed.  It looks like it belongs atop a middle school.  The entrance sort of looked like the building might have once been a movie theater, but all the windows would argue against that.  Then again, old theaters can easily be converted to church spaces.  On the other hand that's clearly an old movie theater right next door behind the tree on the right.  Nobody would put theaters in adjacent buildings would they?  These are the thoughts and questions one has while driving where towns are fifty miles apart.

As usual, Cinema Treasures has the answers.  The Grand Central was a movie theater, operating under different names since at least the 1940s.  Here's a picture from 1980.  The theater in the background was last known as the Audion.  It opened in the 1880s, presumably as an Opera House.  After closing in the 1980s it is now Ellensburg Embroideries.  There you go, more information about Ellensburg movie theater history than you thought was possible to know.

The End Is Nigh

What will people be thinking when they're sitting in church on May 22nd?

Post Mad Bills

Mad, I say, mad.

No Post Bills

In black and white.

Post No Bill

Not here either.