Friday, Oct. 7 — As I pointed the Car of Discovery out of Prosser on a lightly overcast Friday morning, I passed a turnoff labeled "Old Inland Empire Highway." And one thing I've learned on this road trip: If anything out in this neck of the woods is labeled the "old" route, you can bet your shearling-wool seat covers that it will be scenic, pleasantly meandering, and happily absent of Wal-Mart and KFCs.

Besides, I've always been a sucker for that "Inland Empire" name. I pulled a u-turn and took it.

One tip-off that I wasn't in the lumpy Palouse anymore: This road was straight, clear to the horizon. And perfectly centered over the yellow stripe far ahead was something I hadn't seen in hundreds of miles of driving: The Mountain.

Not just any mountain. Our mountain. Rainier, wearing a fresh white cloak of snow. It seems like a long time since I've seen it.

It was calling me home.

I'm ready to sleep in my own bed again. Ready to sniff salty air. Hold my wife. Read the comics with my daughter.

Yesterday was my last "new" county – Franklin — so the rest of my 509 journey is icing – and revisiting some old stomping grounds not seen for a few years.

I took a pleasant drive up through the Yakima Valley, zigzagging around on back roads lined with acres and acres of wine grapes, and the odd poles and wire they use for growing hop vines. Until I hit Mabton, the only life forms I saw on a Friday morning in October were a strutting magpie and a road-kill skunk.

Popular bumper sticker in this half of the state

"Have you fed your kid today? Hug a farmer."

Dino might?

You never know when serendipity and being slightly lost will bring you along a road to something you least expect.

Like the dinosaurs of Granger.

I was trying to get to Zillah in the Yakima Valley, and the map made it look like Granger was on the way there.

So I turned at the entrance to town. But I had to stop as soon as I saw the two big, toothy green dinosaurs on each side of the road, welcoming me to Granger.

And that wasn't all. Just beyond this Welcome Wagon nightmare, there was a whole city park full of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs among the swingsets. A triceratops near the picnic area. There was even a little pond with a big dinosaur out in the middle of it, threatening the pedal-boat dock. And a sort of concession stand in the park was labeled the Dino-Store.

Why are dinosaurs de rigueur in Granger? Had some paleontological dig found dinosaur bones here? Funny, from when I worked at the Yakima paper in the early 1980s, I didn't remember Granger having any dino dig.

So I wandered around the empty park, which is open weekends only right now, and finally found a poster that explained it.

Apparently, the town fathers (and a few mothers) and business moguls put their heads together about 10 years ago and decided their town needed pepping up – it needed a new angle to make people want to turn off the freeway and come spend a few dollars in Granger.

And, as the poster put it, "Everybody liked the idea of dinosaurs. They decided to use dinosaurs as the city's theme."

OK.

They built the first dinosaur in 1994, using a framework of steel rods covered with chicken wire and cement. The project blossomed into an annual festival, "Build a Dino-In-A-Day," borrowing from neighboring Toppenish, which paints an Old West mural in a day every year.

The dinosaurs are lifesize and as true to life as they can make them.

So there are dinosaurs in the park, dinosaurs out front of City Hall, dinosaurs all over town.

Weird.

Got to admit, though: It made me stop.

The Teapot is empty

When I got to Zillah, my hopes were dashed: I couldn't fill my gas tank at the Teapot Dome Service Station.

The gas station, a little building shaped like a teapot, white with a red handle and spout, was built in the early 1920s as a spoof on President Warren G. Harding, who was mired in an ethics scandal involving oil leases at a place called Teapot Dome. The teapot, now a registered historic site, is visible from Interstate 82 near Zillah.

Last time I was by, it was a going concern. Today it was boarded up. The sign out front still advertised gas at a price of $1.11 a gallon. So obviously it's been closed a while.

Milepost

The Car of Discovery's trip odometer, measuring since I left Seattle, clicked over 1,000 miles Friday morning.

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