The ability to entice visitors to your corner of Washington may lie in your area’s unique local history. Statistics show that more and more people are citing historical—whether it be natural, cultural or heritage tourism as the reason for their travel. You need to stay on the forefront of this emerging trend…but how? What is heritage tourism? The National Trust for Historic Preservation defines heritage tourism as “traveling to experience
Happy new year, and welcome to 2015! In the spirit of new beginnings, making resolutions and so forth, I thought I would share some of the blog posts from the last two years that didn’t quite make it to the publish stage. So let it be known that, from this day forward, I will finish every blog post I start – no matter the time or research involved, and no matter
A recent article by the Pacific Northwest Inlander calls into question whether or not Spokane pioneer and founding father, James Glover, is deserving of having a new plaza next to city hall named in his honor. Lisa Waananen Jones, who wrote the Inlander piece, “Facing History: The story that James Glover didn’t want you to know, and why it’s threatening his legacy,” did a competent job assembling the different parts
Today is June 24, 2014. It was on this date twenty years ago that my next-door neighbor crashed one of the biggest, most powerful aircraft ever built into near a nuclear storage facility, leaving his kids fatherless and his wife a widow. With more than 5,000 flight hours under his belt, U.S. Air Force Colonel Bud Holland took his last flight on this day in 1994.
Everybody thought I was joking when I said I was taking a business trip from Olympia to Vancouver to Yakima to Spokane to Wenatchee to Everett to Bellevue to Tacoma and back to Olympia in two days. The itinerary I had laid out with Google Maps said it was a cinch and I’m the guy who enjoys driving around this beautiful state we call home. Well, I proved to everyone
I was almost five years old when I rode on my father’s back during a hike on Mt. Rainier one sunny Saturday afternoon. During that walk, he paused for a moment while viewing the distant, lofty, snow-capped peak to the southwest, speculating aloud on the possibility of one of the 18 volcanoes in the Cascade Mountain Range ever erupting. It was May 17th, 1980, and the next morning the world
They’ll kick you out. In the nicest, most passive-aggressive way, they’ll politely ask you to leave. Let me go back and explain what happened. As anyone from Washington State knows, the drive from Seattle to Spokane (or vice-versa) can be riddled with boredom unless you’re playing traffic games with other drivers or looking for something in particular (like totaling up the different crops with names posted on the fence lines
My father, Walt Ebel, and I began our second annual trip to the Colville Indian Reservation on a Monday in early June. Dad’s been doing this for decades; he visits his best friend, Lyn, and they spend a week on Twin Lakes at Hartman’s Log Cabin Resort near Inchelium. Last year I decided to finally accept their invitation and had such a good time I wanted to make it an
Being cooped up in the house for days on end is enough to drive anyone mad, and throwing a four-year-old in the cage can sometimes seem just plain cruel. So needless to say, I had to get my poor wife and son out of the house before we all ended up in the newspaper the next day. Despite the intermittent weather on Saturday, we decided to visit Tumwater Historical Park
Okay, not IN Moses Lake exactly, but right on the edge of it. It was our annual Ebel-Fenton-Campbell-Zandofsky (Hankins-Schab-Sherbahn) reunion and we held it at Pier 4 Sunrise Reports, a perfect spot for such an event. After last year’s reunion in Packwood – which many family members couldn’t attend due to distance – I worked with a few cousins to make sure we had it in more of a centrally