This country is full of so many wonderful and amazing things!  It always makes me wonder about the people who were the driving forces to make these things happen?  Who had the vision and the enthusiasm to make it all come together? We've now been on the road a week, and we've already seen so many wonderful things:

Like the wild horses sculpture on top of the mesa overlooking the Columbia River.  It was a really steep climb up the hill to get there.  (And Dick and I were both too chicken to venture back down the way we came up.  So we climbed down through the rocks instead).  Anyway, they probably used helicopters to bring the pieces for these wonderful metal sculptures to this site.  There are 15 life-size wild horses, galloping and rearing up -- giving the impression of exuberance and flight. Like the small town of Toppenish Washington, with it's 57 murals.  All through the town there are outdoor murals of early western scenes on the buildings.  The scenes included a wonderful large mural of a western town scene on market day, another of Indians harvesting hops, one of cowboys branding steer, and one showing kids toppling an outhouse (with someone in it) on Halloween - you get the idea.  All the murals were designed or painted by very competent artists and were really well executed.

Like the Maryhill Museum nears Biggs Oregon.  Here the collection is eclectic, but outstanding. It included (among other things) Indian artifacts, the Queen of Romania's furniture, some wonderful American Realism paintings, an entire room of interesting chess sets, and a reconstruction of the original Theater de la Mode (Fashion Theater) from France.  This theater was a collection of about 100 3-foot high, metal-mesh dolls with pretty (plaster?) heads (and waists a la Barbie,) all dressed to the tee in the haute fashions of Paris, circa 1946.  The dolls were set in various scenes as in a play.  They wore hats, shoes, handbags, etc. The whole thing had been built after WW II to perk up peoples' spirits in France and to raise funds for reconstruction projects.  

Like the full size and complete (that is, no missing boulders) re-creation of Stonehenge.  This replica overlooks the Columbia River and was built as a memorial to 8 soldiers who died in WW I.  

And these were things we saw within the last 24 hours!!!!