Getting together this summer up north

The lovely and vivacious Helen Roberts asked me to post this, so how could I resist?

Editor's note: She didn't ask you to post the picture.

Spoilsport.

I could have made her a blogger and told her to do it herself, but I don't have all that much to do these days other than to apply for unemployment, look for jobs and watch old movies on DVD.

Hey, it's a great life.

Anyway, Helen wanted me to announce to the entire class -- at least to the folks in the know enough to read this blog -- that the annual WTW Northwest Rendezvous will take place August 1-3 in the metropolis of La Conner, Washington.

Now what I find interesting about that is that La Conner has the same initials and the same number of letters as my home town of La Canada (pronounced Can-yada, it's a Mexican thing) and is actually within an hour or so of the real La Canada (pronounced Can-a-da, it's a French thing).

Anyway, Helen is among a group of West Coast Woodsonites, including Marna (Podonsky) and Leroy Hanneman (who actually live in La Conner), Bob and Dianne Douthitt (who live in Spokane, home of Ryne Sandberg, John Stockton and that quarterback I can't remember who won the Redskins' last Super Bowl), Rob and Loretta Gohd (of Bremerton), Greg Keever (of Los Angeles), Chris and Carol Kessler (of Seattle), Mike and Wendy McCuddin (of Port Orchard) and Anne Gibson Snyder (of that easternmost of west coast cities, Middletown, Md.), who get together in the Northwest every year or so.

Now Helen had a lot of cool stuff to say about La Conner, about the fact that it's an outdoor paradise, an art colony and that there are two girls for every boy (wait, I think that's Surf City).

She's right. It's a cool place, even though the closest I've ever been to it was Seattle in 1989 when I was covering college basketball. You can look it up on this link to the city's Web site if you doubt me, but there's really only one thing you need to know.

If you have always lived in the East, if you've never been farther west than West Virginia, you've missed out on the best part of this country. I don't mean the Northwest (I actually prefer California), but the entire West itself.

I've lived in Colorado, Nevada and Southern California, and things really are different out here. Don't forget that the bluest skies you'll ever see are in Seattle (Perry Como), that it never rains in Southern California (Albert Hammond, a lie) or that you can see it raining fire in the skies of the Rocky Mountains (John Denver).

Once you've been to La Conner, you can carry yourself back to old Virginny for the rest of the year. But don't miss it.

C'mon, how often do you have a chance to see two of the greatest legends of the class of '67 in the same place?

Editor's note: Which ones?

That's the best part. There are enough people on that list that they can be whoever you want them to be.

So in the Virginia vernacular, y'all come.