On February 17, Lloyd and I had the opportunity to go to Yakima Washington to attend a pear ripening seminar.
Over the years when Lloyd worked in the banking industry we would attend conferences in New Orleans, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. When you are a farmer, I guess that you attend conferences in Yakima!! Yakima is in the heart of the central Washington~Oregon fruit growing country. The seminar was sponsored by Washington State University.
It was very fascinating but we were way out of our league. We just wanted to know how to get pears ripe and tell our customer how to do so. These guys were the big guns who represented big growers and big chains like Wal-Mart. They were kind enough to humor us and we made some good networking connections with the Pear Bureau of Oregon and scientists from UCDavis whose only field is to study pears and their diseases and habits.
As we have taken pix of our other conference locations over the years, we could not leave Yakima out. The most interesting thing that I could find on our way out of town was the courthouse across the street from the gas station~
