10 Nights in the Tri-Cities

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I should probably explain that there are four cities in the Tri-Cities region of southeastern Washington state. Kennewick, Richland, Pasco and West Richland. It wasn't perfectly clear why they don't call it the Quad-Cities, but it sounds like West Richland was incorporated later and is now part of the region that was called the Tri-Cities and they decided not to change the Tri to Quad. 

And why are we headed to the Tri-Cities? The main reason is there will be a geocaching Mega-Event so we worked this place and that event into our travel plans. More on the event later. The drive from the Emigrant Springs in Oregon was exactly 100 miles. Other than we were starting out in a little bit of rain, the drive went smoothly. Even going down the twisty section of Interstate 82, that I posted about in our last blog, wasn't too bad. I definitely prefer having the exhaust brake in our Dutch Star over the downshifting and braking (and praying) of our previous motorhome. I had scoped out a truck and RV friendly fuel stop along the way that included truck filling lanes. The only problem was that in order to use the truck pumps, you needed to have a couple different Oregon registration IDs. Oh well, it turned out the passenger vehicle pumps had adequate room to navigate this thing through without issue. 

Our destination for our 10 nights is the Corps of Engineering (COE) run Hood Park, technically in the little town of Burbank Washington just across the Snake River from Pasco only a couple miles from the state park where the event will be held. The area is where the Snake River joins the Columbia River. It wasn't perfectly clear why this COE park was here since there wasn't a dam or lake here. But it turned out to be like most other COE parks we have camped at - well maintained with pretty nice sites for a good price at just over $19 per night. The sites are electric only but include 50 amp. They are pretty thorough in their watering of the grass in the campsites. Each morning, one of the workers would drive around the campgrounds and determine which site he could water and then set up the sprinkler and let it run most of the time until mid afternoon. By staying here ten nights, we were probably messing with their watering routine.

It was a good thing we had reserved our spot months ago since the campground was full for the two weekends we were here. Lots of real "campers" in tents and small travel trailers and the occasional big motorhome and a few huge toy hauler fifth wheels. It seemed like oftentimes two or more of the sites were people that were camping together. They would have the cornhole and other games in one person's site and the picnic tables concentrated on the other site. 

There were nice views from many of the sites. One side of the park was adjacent to the Snake River, the other side was overlooking some small ponds. While our spot was next to a neighboring field with a couple cows and several horses. It turned out to be a nice place to relax most of the time. And we did find ourselves taking it pretty easy on most of the days.

Pond View

Our Cows Say Hi

We headed over to Walla Walla for the Sweet Onion Festival. It is just over 40 miles from our campsite. We weren't quite sure what to expect but it did seem a bit smaller than we were imagining. There were a few dozen vendors but only a couple of them had onion based themes. When it comes down to it, I suppose there are really only so many things you can do with onions. We tried the vendor selling onion rings which were good. It didn't take much more than an hour to peruse the whole place so we decided to walk through the downtown area that had quite a few nice little shops. We walked to the far side of town to see Whitman College. The webcam cache we had hoped to complete was offline so we just headed back to the car.

Tractors Put to Use

Crowd of People at Festival

Interesting Wall in Town

This area of Washington state has quite a few wineries. We picked one that is actually associated with the local community college. When we entered the tasting room, there were probably 15 people there. We had one of the recent graduates pour us our samples and explain the wines to us. Before we were even halfway done, we were the only ones still there so we had a nice chat with the recent graduate, plus an incoming student just starting the program. Apparently even 18 year olds are permitted to be in the program and taste the wine they are working on even with a drinking age of 21. The rule is they taste the wine, but must spit it out.

We had ordered a Weboost Cellular Signal Booster when we were in Salt Lake City, but I hadn't had an opportunity to test it out or install it yet. The concept is simple. The outdoor antenna mounts up high, usually on the roof of the RV. A coax cable is fed into the rig to an amplifier and a smaller internal antenna is fed from the amplifier. In areas where the cell signal is poor, this system will give us a fighting chance to get a reasonable signal. Of course if there is no signal to be had, the booster cannot make something out of nothing. One drawback is that the cell phone or iPad needs to be sitting within a few feet of the indoor antenna to get any signal. This isn't too bad since one phone can be placed by the antenna and then turn it on as a wi-fi hotspot so other devices can connect to it.

I'm okay with going up on the roof and doing the work with the exception of drilling a hole through the roof to run the coax cable. I came up with a solution that uses one of several existing coax cables from our rooftop satellite dish. Since we don't use the dish, the cables are available. Better yet, I find the one that feeds into the front overhead compartment where I want the amplifier installed. I tried it out with the outdoor antenna simply clamped in place. Once I was satisfied it would work, I found a couple of stainless steel brackets intended to be used to hold a handrail. That portion of the install was pretty easy other than it was rather hot up on the roof the day I did the install. In the campsite we were in, I had reasonable Verizon coverage so the booster wasn't required but Chris' T-Mobile signal was unusable without the booster, but worked with it. I guess we will see how it goes as we move about. 

Brackets Holding Outside Antenna

After Applying Dicor to Make It Watertight

We found there was a disc golf course in the area so we decided to give it a shot. It has been at least a couple months since we had played so we were rusty and that's on top of the fact that we aren't real good even when we play more frequently. At least this course didn't have any water hazards to deal with but it did start out with lots of tall grass and brush so finding our discs after each throw was a bit of a challenge. We survived but it definitely wasn't pretty. 

One of the visitor's guides we picked up for the area described the Hanford B-Reactor tour. Depending on your age, education and interest in the subject, you may be familiar with this place but I will admit I didn't know anything about it. For all I know, it was taught to me somewhere along the way, but it didn't stick. The place was built by the US government back in the 1943 timeframe to produce weapons grade plutonium to be used in an atomic bomb. It was one of several areas associated with the Manhattan Project. The area was picked for its remote location (at the time) and a large source of water (Columbia River). The whole reactor facility was built in just a little over a year! It produced the plutonium used in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki Japan in the summer of 1945.

Since we were somewhat ignorant of what happened here and not all that familiar with nuclear fission, we decided to spend the night before the tour watching several videos provided that detail how plutonium is produced, how this facility was built and how the reactor works. I will admit that this is the first time we ever "studied" in order to take a tour of National Historic place. The six people in tents at the next door campsite had come across as a bunch of country bumpkins. So while we are sitting watching some fairly intense atomic theory videos, we could hear them talking while sitting around their fire and I suggested we invite them over for a fun evening with the Rutters! 

There were a handful of reactors on the property that have been or are in the process of being decommissioned. The B reactor has been set up for tours since 2009 and is now part of the National Park System. Tours are free, but you must register for them online in advance. We managed to check one day and found the next morning's tour had plenty of openings. The starting point for the tour is in a little strip mall location about a 45 minute drive from the reactor. It is definitely not an expected spot for the tour and it wasn't until we saw the signs that we were sure we were in the right spot. There are several rooms in this facility with lots of pictures and displays to check out while you wait for the tour to start.

The OffSite Starting Point for B-Reactor Tour

There were 16 or so of us for our tour. We started out with the tour guide giving some descriptions and then playing the movie that went through more about the facility. It wasn't one of the videos we had watched the previous evening but did go over much of the same things. Next we hop onto a nice big tour bus like Greyhound uses and we are driven to the reactor. Our tour guide gives more description along the way including pointing out some other remaining buildings on the huge Hanford that can be seen from the road.

Your Fission Lesson for the Day

Spare Pieces of the Reactor Core

Cutaway Model Showing Core and Shielding

The B-reactor building was definitely not built with aesthetics in mind but given the urgency to beat the Germans to producing an atomic bomb at the time, I think it was understandable. Front side of the reactor pile is accessible on the tour but the back side isn't. Several other tour guides are at the reactor and do a little more talking and play an additional video. Then they take us around all the portions of the building we are permitted into, including the control room. It is very impressive given the technology of that era. After the formal tour, we are more or less turned loose to explore on our own in order to read many of the displays and even play with some of the models they have created. It was way cool. I'm sure Leonard and Sheldon would be jealous. 

Entrance to B-Reactor

Front Side of Reactor with a Total of 2004 Tubes for Uranium

Close Up of Plumbers NIghtmare

Main Control Room

Temp and Pressure Panel For Each of the 2004 Tubes

The Mess Behind the Panel

It is kind of surprising that the whole tour is free. It doesn't seem like the type of thing that will survive much longer in its current form. If you are ever even close to this portion of southeastern Washington state, put this place high on your list.

Did Gary Larson Work Here???

Hack Saw on Steroids

After a week in the area, it was now time for the geocaching events to start. The first was an event held at a pizza joint. Oftentimes geocaching events center around food. Back home it was often ice cream, but the pizza here was good. We easily filled up the one large room we had with 60 or more people. We were readily accepted into the fold by those local people sitting at our table. Many of them gave us suggestions of other things to see and do while we were here. This first event was to kick off a poker run they had planned. This one was arranged that you go around town and find five new geocaches and punch your poker run passport with the unique paper punch at each one. Then at tomorrow's event you trade in your punched passport for your five cards. We ended up only drawing a pair of kings so didn't t have much chance of winning anything.

Friday's event was a meet and greet at the same park where the actual Mega-Event would be on Saturday. As we were chatting with people, we found another camper from our COE campground that was in from out of town. Not only that, it turns out we had found about 20 of his caches when we were in Arizona camped at Lost Dutchman State Park. Many of those caches were very creative ones, that I had event written about in a blog post from that stop. What a small world.  

Now That's a BIG Ammo Can

Even Signal the Frog (Geocaching's Mascot) Made an Appearance

There was also a night cache that was setup in Sacajawea State Park. We all started doing it prior to dusk and with a string of people going from one spot to the next, it wasn't too challenging. 

The actual Mega-Event wasn't until early Saturday morning. This one was setup with 8 new caches in each of the four Tri-Cities. In each of these caches, there would either be a code word or a paper punch. The goal was to find the caches and fill up your sheet. The "prize" was to be a set of geocoins. In order to qualify for the coins you needed to find 7 of the 8 in each town or if you opted to do the two puzzle caches that were part of the series you only needed to find 6 of the 8. So the minimum number needed would be 26 of the 32. We typically don't do that many caches in a day, and it wasn't necessary to do them all in one day, but we didn't want to have to go back out the following day.

The Group Getting Ready for Photo by Drone

The 32 new caches were published at 9:30 AM while the group picture was being taken. We figured out the two puzzle caches without too much trouble so off we went. We headed to the furthest out cache with the idea of working our way back to the location of the event and get our coins. I really should have reset the Jeep's trip computer to see how many miles we drove, but I would suspect 70 miles wouldn't be too bad of a guess. 

Most of the hides were super easy simply because there would be a group of other cachers standing at the cache signing in and getting the code word. I think there was only 2 or 3 caches where I needed to pull out the GPS to search for the cache on our own. It took us 8 hours with only a break for lunch and ice cream mid-afternoon since it was a really hot day. Although apparently not as hot as two years ago when it was up around 115 degrees.  

After we picked up our coins, we grabbed some dinner and sat around talking with a couple that had just gotten their first travel trailer and were starting to make plans for camping with it. It was nice to be able to give them some advice that will hopefully help them out. The event ended with drawings for a multitude of donated gifts. One of our numbers was called and we won an additional geocoin. 

Front and Back of 4 Coin Set

The following day was the Cache In Trash Out event (CITO) in the same park the main event was held. A CITO is where a bunch of geocachers get together to pick up trash. It turns out Sacajawea park is kept pretty clean by the staff and visitors. With about 50 people people walking around the small park, there wasn't much trash to be had. In past CITOs we have done, we will often fill up a full size trash bag and have difficulty carrying it back to the dumpsters. That wasn't the case here. The park started out pretty clean and ended up very clean.

Our time here seemed to go pretty fast even though we took it easy for a fair amount of time. Guess it proves we don't always have to be busy at each place we stop at.