Show 'n shine under the sun

This tail light says it all about classic cars.

The summer car show season is underway in Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon, as well as elsewhere around the country.

We went to our first show of the season today, an annual event on the Parkade in downtown Kennewick. We go to a lot of shows throughout the region every season, like most Saturdays between late April and September. Sometimes it seems we see the same cars over and over. Today was different, as there were a lot of cars we'd never seen before.

My favorite car today was a white Mercury, probably from the late 1940s. I loved the tail lights: big dollar signs. That says it all. Restoring old cars is expensive, even if owners do most of the work themselves. Restored classic cars sell for many times the original price. One beautiful car carried a price tag of $32,000; it probably cost under a thousand dollars when the first owner drove it off the lot.

The big car show in this area is Cool Desert Nights, which attracts hundreds of cars to Richland the last weekend in June every year.  My favorite car show is the one in Joseph, Oregon, which we just happened upon since I had to be in the nearby town of Enterprise for a work assignment, and wanted to drive over to Wallowa Lake for lunch.

We never made it to Wallowa Lake because of the car show. Joseph is a small Western-themed town that has the most amazing outdoor sculpture museum that I've ever seen. Bronze statues of horses, cowboys, cougars and Indians line both sides of the town's main street.