Another spring, another family trip out west for the spring WOKR (Willys Overland Knight Registry) car meet! This April, we went to scenic Goldendale, Washington, and enjoyed some of the museums out there, as well as an illuminating trip to the Goldendale Observatory! We didn’t take the Willys for this trip - it’s still a bit early and cold for 90 year old cars. Just the Volt.

Heading Out

As is pretty typical for us these days, we started out on a Thursday late afternoon after school. Load Volt, head west. I’ve decided, after much experimentation, that the right way to do road trips in the Volt is to start the day with a full battery, let it run for a bar or two of charge, and then enable hold mode for the rest of the trip until very close to the end. This entirely solves mountain passes and grades, because even in “mountain mode,” the car will run out of reserve battery pack capacity when climbing steeply and will enter “6000 RPM semi truck” mode, which just isn’t enjoyable. I’ve verified with my phone tools that it will absolutely chew through a bunch of pack capacity climbing hard - but it also doesn’t wind the engine up to redline, either, and I can just hold full highway speeds up a grade without any trouble. It’s taken a few trips to work all the details out, but I’m happy with how I run things now, and it just improves how amazingly good the Volt is as a long distance highway cruiser.

Our spring has been staggeringly wet this year. We’ve had most of a year’s rain in the first few months of the year, so everything is very, very green - and not that sort of pale yellow green that’s typical for the area either. It’s properly green and growing happily, though I’m a little bit afraid of what this fire season is going to bring.

The biggest difference, this year, is that the trip west wasn’t into a stiff headwind. Usually we’re fighting winds the entire trip - but that cloud of steam off some cooling tower or another is going straight up. No wind at all, and that makes for some very nice driving!

Day One, Morning: Bickleton, Washington

Friday morning, we set out on a beautiful drive to Bickelton. Fully equipped with a car trip scavenger hunt sheet of paper, we rolled through a nice collection of rural two lane, through an amazing little valley of twisty roads that would have been amazing on a motorcycle, and rolled into the little town of Bickelton, Washington to see their Carousel Museum.

I’ve actually done an entire separate post about the carousel museum, so I’ll just hit a few high points here.

They have an amazing collection of well documented barbed wire, which I’ve never really considered in depth before.

The nicely restored horses and sleds for the town’s 1905 Herschell-Spillman carousel also live in here when they’re not on the carousel. It’s been quite an effort over a number of years to restore the carousel, but it’s only used once or twice a year for a town-wide celebration, so most of it stays indoors the rest of the year.

There’s a massive arrowhead collection that spans a large fraction of the outside walls of the museum, as well as some additional display space further in. The arrowheads aren’t just organized in rows, they’re made into very interesting art.

I’m inclined to think the world would be somewhat better off these days if our living rooms looked more like this, and less like “places to stare at screens.” Making music as a group is something amazing, and it’s something that we’ve added back in, with weekly hymn sings at the lifegroup we host. And, yes, I do have a quite functional record player in our living room too.

Plus, a rather impressive Pyrex collection!

The Blue Bird Inn is a nice little stop for lunch, and the collection of BMW motorcycles out front argues that, yes, this is a place well worth stopping if you’re coming through the area on motorcycles!

The Goldendale Observatory

Later in the afternoon, we gathered again at the Goldendale Observatory for their “solar program.” They redid the observatory not that many years back, and while it’s more of an outreach and educational facility at this time, they’ve got a pretty nice collection of solar telescopes doing continuous observation in a back dome too.

With the sun out in the late spring, we found this cute little guy resting on a rock, enjoying the heat.

The main telescope was originally a 24.5” Cassegrain reflecting telescope, converted to a Newtonian design during the refurbishment in 2016-2018. For the solar observations we used the smaller refracting telescope on the side with a sun shield over it (think “eclipse glasses,” but for a telescope). The mount used here is an older style that allowed for easy tracking of stellar objects before computerized tracking was a thing - it simply counters the earth’s rotation mechanically.

After some explanation about the telescopes and the site, the sun shield went on, some stairs went up, and we all got to look through the telescope at the sun. As has been in the news recently, we’re near a solar maximum, and so we got to see a good collection of sunspots. During solar minimums, it’s usually a boring flat disc, but we certainly got to see the little black spots that indicate solar excitement!

After we’d all had a chance to look at the sun, we went into the auditorium for an hour long presentation that covered the sun, star types, our ever-more-wandering magnetic poles on Earth, and a range of other topics all generally in the “space” category. It’s worth seeing - they have a lot of resources they can bring, including live feeds of the sun from the other telescopes on-site (where they can tune the filters realtime). They had an open Q&A period too, with a couple people who genuinely knew Earth, Sun, and planets!

Maryhill Museum

The next morning we took off along the river for a while, on our way to…

The Maryhill Museum of Art! Originally intended as a mansion for Sam Hill, he eventually was convinced to turn it into a museum. Opened in 1926 with a visit from the Queen Marie of Romania, it’s got a decent collection of art and artifacts, both local and global.

The grounds include quite a few various statues, as one would expect for an art museum, and a nice overlook of the river area. That balcony to the left has a lower level we had lunch on.

The entry room includes quite a few pieces of furniture provided by Queen Marie. It’s all very golden-looking, though I don’t know if it’s actually gold leaf, or just a paint.

Having something like this in your room would certainly put you in a certain frame of mind every morning…

A “Corner Throne.” I’ll suggest that this is a really good design for keeping people warm in the winter. The overhangs help keep the person on the throne pretty warm in a cooler building. Sucks to be on the sides, but you’re not the queen out there, are you?

Another section of art currently on display relates to the Columbia River, and this particular bit of art (“Our Rivers are Paved” by Richard C. Harrington) argues for the removal of several dams on the river that interfere with the giant salmon that used to spawn in the river. As time goes on, it seems that some of the damming of rivers was a bad idea, ecologically…

Another section has a collection of Orthodox icons - a particular style of art involving scenes from Biblical and church history, intended to help focus one’s mind, I believe. I’m not particularly familiar with the Orthodox traditions and use of icons, so if anyone has more direct experience, feel free to add something in the comments.

Any good museum has a collection of busts, right? You can also see some of the museum’s construction in this room. Steel I-beams and concrete make up the structure, with plaster and (metal) lath for the walls. It’s massive, and isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

The unexpected gem of their displays right now, though, is their chess board exhibit! Downstairs, one of the hallways is simply filled with unique chess sets and chess pieces. Pottery, metal, plastic, it’s all here, and they don’t even have their entire collection on display!

The lower pieces here have “nesting balls” beneath them. I’ve no idea how you make them, but they’re concentric balls, carved in place - think a turner’s cube, but for carving, not machining.

This beautiful set, by Guiseppe Vasari, is is gold and silver fused onto hand-cast Italian brass. Pictures really don’t do the pieces justice - I had to shoot through the plexiglass cases, and my camera really struggled with aspects of that.

This glorious aluminum set of pieces was a gift from Columbia Aluminum to their customers. In the mid-1990s, they operated a smelter by the John Day dam on the Columbia river (since hydroelectric power and aluminum smelting go really well together).

And for something a bit more modern, Christopher Gizzi designed and 3D printed this set in 2020, working with a beautiful double helix design.

There were endless sets and collections - if you like unique chess pieces, this exhibit alone is worth the visit!

In one of the exterior walls that was opened up for an expansion, they’ve left the raw concrete exposed - and, how familiar this is to me! The art of “lobbing a lot of local basalt in the concrete pour” was well used in our church building too, and jackhamering out some concrete involved moving a lot of rock out of the rubble. It seems to work just fine, and saves a good bit of concrete volume! I don’t see much concerning in how the concrete bonded to the rock here, and the church building foundation is at least 100 years old and still doing fine.

Lunch was on a balcony overlooking the river - just a nice scenic view. We watched some barges go back and forth - less shipping than I would have generally expected on the river, though.

After lunch, because people knew people, some of us had a chance to go into the back and see the stuff not-on-display. They have a glorious back storage room, complete with “rolling shelves on rails” - they stack tightly against each other, opening up an aisle at a time for access, but being far denser storage than normal shelving units with aisles between each one. They’re not cheap, but man, do I want some…

Like any decent museum, they have far, far more items than they can reasonably display, so collections are kept, prepared, rotated, etc. It’s just an amazing storage solution back here that keeps huge amounts of stuff in a very small space!

Storing large paintings safely isn’t something I’ve really considered, but they basically have to be hung - so one wall is nothing but paintings that are hung, awaiting a chance to be rotated into the display areas.

Concrete Stonehenge

Finally, we went out to what is accurately described as a “Concrete Replica of Stonehenge.” It’s exactly that.

I’m not sure why, but it’s absolutely a thing out along the river! We spent a while exploring it, and then headed back into town.

There was no mural-hunting contest this year, but neither could we resist the temptation to get a few photos along murals in town. I really like this trend of putting up murals along buildings in small towns. I’ve seen it quite a few places recently, and it really does a nice job of making towns feel a bit more alive, a bit more welcoming.

I’ve no idea how well this sign works, but I saw this exact sign a few different places throughout the county.

And I learned, having long since been in the habit of tapping “pause” for audiobooks in the car, that you can pause live radio in the Volt - it will let you buffer up to 20 minutes of it with the pause button!

Anyway. Goldendale is a neat little area to drop in, if you’re out that way!