pic dump: scenes from Walla Walla and beyond

These pics are hosted over at Photobucket; they may appear cut off on this blog, so my advice is to right-click a given image, then do a "show picture" or "view image" command. If that doesn't work, try right-clicking the image, selecting "properties," and cutting and pasting the image's URL into a separate browser window so you can see the pic at full size.

Hover your cursor over each pic to read the caption.



I decided to take a stroll through Whitman College's fine arts hall, a building I'd been passing almost daily on my way to the library.



















The above two pics come from the same piece: a chair faces a wall that is blank except for the graffito "I think, I am alive." The comma is ungrammatical, but is it there intentionally? [NB: A proper construction would either have no comma or would use a semicolon in place of a comma. People often mistakenly use commas when what they really need is a semicolon.]







The above two photos were taken while I was seated at my favorite lunch spot on Whitman's campus grounds.



I took the above pic while waiting outside Maxey Hall just before Michael Shermer's presentation on "Why People Believe Weird Things." Cute dawg. Very friendly. I sat next to her, and she tried climbing into my lap-- about the only woman to pull that stunt since, oh, 2005.













My host Bob, who was renting from CouchSurfing host Jeanie (and her hubby Rob), used to own a restaurant. I was wowed by his kitchen, but while he liked it, he thought it needed a bar and some other minor tweaks.





I met the above two dudes while walking toward the campus convenience store to say goodbye to the Korean couple managing the place. Tony and Mark were taking a break from working on Mark's house, and they boomed out their "hello"s to me as I was passing. I stopped and talked with them about travel, the difficulty of doing renovation work, and other matters. Mark told me I'd be welcome to stop on by when I'm back in Walla Walla. Friendly folks. I've been fortunate: the Pacific Northwest has left me with a great impression of its people.

Below, we see the Korean couple who run the local Apex Food Mart together. The Missus was shy about being photographed. We said our goodbyes after I took a couple pics; the hubby wanted a photo alone with me, and that's what you'll see after the pic below.





I went over to the teriyaki-jip for a final meal, and managed to get pics of the couple running that place, as well.



The server, Andrew, took the following pics:





The following three pics are of my upstairs bedroom in Bob's place. I appreciate his hospitality.







And below, we've got shots of the Bob-meister himself: restaurateur, guitar player/singer, gastronome, bon vivant, horse rider, and Licensed Practical Nurse.







The following shots are from a brief detour I took with Lori and Kaylee to the Whitman Mission. From the main building (which houses a small museum and theater), you can walk left and see where the Whitmans died, or you can walk right and see where they lived. Whether we went left or right will become obvious when you see the next few photos.









The following pics come from my drive to Portland, Oregon with Chuck. We were in Kaylee's SUV, and Chuck saw an opportunity to photograph Mount Hood. What follows are the sad results of my attempts at shooting the venerable formation:








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