This morning the Sea Lion came alongside the floating dock at the Dalles and we boarded two buses for an exciting morning tour of Maryhill Museum and the Columbia River Gorge Discovery Center. Our buses passed over the highway bridge just downstream of the Dalles Dam and Locks and we could see the very locks that we had passed through only an hour before on our little ship. We then drove east along the Washington state side of the river, getting a close look at the terraced basalt flows that had been eroded and sculpted by the dramatic Bretz floods of 15,000 to 12,000 years ago. After about ½ hour, we came to a green oasis in the midst of the dry grasslands of the east side of the Cascades and entered the magical grounds of Maryhill.

In 1907 Sam Hill bought 7,000 acres along the Columbia River where he hoped to establish a Quaker agricultural community. Sam was a visionary and built Maryhill, the concrete building and surrounding lands we visited, as his home "where the sun of the East meets the rain of the West". His dream of a Quaker community died before fruition and Loie Fuller, a friend and avant-garde dancer, convinced him to turn the structure into a museum. The museum was dedicated in 1926 by another friend, Queen Marie of Romania. When faced with the dedication of the empty concrete shell of the future museum in the middle of nowhere, she graciously spoke to the gathered crowd saying, "There is much more than concrete in this structure. There is a dream built into this place, a dream for today and especially for tomorrow." We saw that dream in the wonderful collection of Native American artifacts, Rodin drawings and sculptures, contemporary prints, Romanian objects of Royalty and beautiful gardens.