Old Abandoned School House on US 2 in Washington

Many years ago in 1984 I was a young man of 24. I worked for Northern Telecom and was flying to Toronto Canada every week to work on a software project and was having a blast. I got bumped from a flight and Delta gave me a free round trip ticket to any place they flew in the lower 48 states.

I looked at their route map and the farthest place I could fly was Seattle Washington. So I took a week of vacation, packed the tent and sleeping bag and flew to Seattle. I traveled for a week in a big circle through the North Cascades, eastern Washington, Oregon and California. I remember buying a bag of cherries near Grand Coulee Dam late one day. I drove around the lake in the golden light just before sunset eating cherries and spitting the pits through the sunroof with the music playing loud. I was on top of the world.

I have always enjoyed photography so I had my 35mm Pentax ME Super camera with me. I saw a building I just had to photograph. The photo is below.

I have looked at this photo a few times over the years and wondered where the building was and what happened to it. This was the day before GPS and storing coordinates for every photo.

We were on US 2 in Washington late in the day and had just found another building (see below) when I saw the outline of a building that stirred some memories. I had to make a U turn and also convince Laurie and Tucker that this was a worthy stop. It was the building I had photographed 28 years ago in my youth. It looked a little more tired but the building was still there. We spent half an hour taking photos. It was great. We decided it was a school building. The building had large windows on only one side so we thought the students sat with the windows behind them to provide light and the teacher's blackboard was on the other wall with no windows. See the photos below. I noticed later on Google Maps that the building is the Highland School House.

This was a very nice stop that brought back some pleasant memories. I did not expect to ever see this building again.

In 2001 myself, the boys and my parents were on a trip that took us to Washington. The building below caught my attention and I had to stop to take a photo.

I had not planned to look for this building but I knew what it was from a couple of miles away. This building and the school house above are close together. Below are the photos I took. The paint has been updated but the building is the same. I really enjoyed finding these two buildings on US 2 in Washington.