We are just back from a four day trip to the Tri-Cities area of Washington.

We've really taken to liking these 3 and 4 day trips to areas we've never been before, and have no real reason to visit now. They've turned into bookman holiday's, really, because we visit every bookstore, new or used, and every comic shop we see, and we seek out others. We buy from almost every store, and get ideas -- both what to do and what not to do -- at almost every place we see.

I also like to try to get a sense of the towns, and especially the old downtown cores.

And the other thing we do, is pull off the highway to actually go into all these small towns, instead of whipping bypass them. And whenever possible, we take the 'scenic' route, which usually seems to add about 1/2 an hour to any 2 & 1/2 hour trip, which seems like a small price to pay to see terrain and towns we'd never see otherwise.

One observation I'd like to make right off the top: Old Oregon and Washington are still there in the rural and small towns. Every road you go down, there are people out there. It doesn't look anything like the life you see in the Movies and T.V. So you find out things like, that the hills above Sutherlin and Sublimity, (the Silver Falls area), are packed with tree farms, hillside after hillside.

Or you see that the Yakima Reservation terrain looks alot like the Warm Springs terrain.

Or you drive between Oregon City and Malalla and see farmlands as far as the eye can see. (Which I shudder to think might be subdivisions without the Oregon Land Use laws.)

And if Bend thinks it's unique in it's outdoor life, it's anything but. There are recreational areas everywhere in eastern Washington and Oregon, and all over rural western Oregon and Washington.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone else. But I think I've spent most of my adult life speeding down highways and interstates, in a hurry to get somewhere, when it's the little towns and hamlets in between, or the hills and dales and hollows behind, that are most interesting.

On the way up, we went up Highway 97, through Goldendale and the Yakima Reservation, stopped at Toppenish, and then took the back road to get to the Tri-Cities.

The Tri-Cities; about 163,000 population combined, or about twice the size of the Bend urban area. Kennewick around 65k; Richland and West Richland about 55k; and Pasco about 45k. Very flat and spread out, and the big boxes seem bigger and less clustered. Interstates connect all three cities so that, for instance, when Linda wanted to got to a church on Sunday in Richland, we left our motel in Kennewick an hour early, just in case. Instead, we got there in maybe 5 minutes, or less time than it takes for me to get from Williamson Park to downtown Bend.

We stayed in Kennewick, but visited Richland first. Richland's downtown is very spread-out, with lots of older, but large government buildings, health facilities, etc. Very little commercial that I could see. There were a couple of old, rundown strip-malls where you would normally have found a downtown core. Maybe I never found it, but I drove all over while Linda was in church, so either they never really had a commercial downtown core like most towns, or it got replaced.

They had a very nice used bookstore, The Bookworm, which also had a branch in Kennewick. Neat, orderly, nice selection of new and used. All the things that we usually don't find in used bookstores. Not really very big stores, but nice.

In one of the old strip malls, we found a gigantic used bookstore/comic store called Adventures Underground, which has been open since June of this year. The owner was a 26 year old and his wife, who had apparently been selling books online for some time. They had 5500 sq. ft. in ground floor space, (by contrast, my wife's store has about 2200), and another 2500 behind a wall and yet another 8000 sq. ft. of storage above! (which wasn't part of the rent.) He had about 60k books, about 5k new. He had a decent selection of graphic novels, with an actual emphasis on independents (which is unusual). He was discounting almost all the new material, and he told me that he was doing so well with the used books that he could afford to discount.

This sounded so much like me when I started, I winced. I was bringing in so much cash on sports cards that I thought I could afford to hold prices below what I could actually get. What I didn't see back then, and which hard experience taught me, was that the time would come when I would need to make every cent I could just to survive. There is no reason not to make the money you can when you can, and every reason not to set a 'discounting' precedent that you can't drop later.

"How many Harry Potter's did you sell?" I asked.

"About 60," he said.

"How much did you make on each book?"

"Almost nothing," he grimaced. "Maybe 2.00."

"So you made 120.00 on a 1000.00 investment. I sold 10 Harry Potter's at full price, so I made 175.00 on a 175.00 investment.

"Thing is, Harry Potter was a seller. Take the same discount on a book you get stuck with, and you will lose money."

Couldn't convince him. He was certain he needed to discount to make it.

He had a glorious amount of space.

Unbelievable. I was so envious. His rent was only 30 cents a foot, vs. mine of 2.10 a foot, but it was a balloon rate, which was going to double up in six months. He'd sunk an unbelievable amount of money into opening his business. (Ten times what I invested 24 years ago in mine.) His bookshelves were the expensive type, and he had lots of them. He also carried boardgames and card games and a smattering of role-playing. No toys, no statues, no t-shirts etc.

It was obvious his focus was on books. He'd all but given up on new comics, and had a small batch on the wall, though he had a fairly large amount of back-issues in beautiful but expensive racks. It was a little strange that he had so few new comics when all it would take to build it up was a few hundred dollars, when he was spending tens of thousands on other parts of the store.

The thing that really killed me was that only about half to two/thirds the display space was being used. As the owner of a store that has to fight for every inch, it just about made me want to go around rearranging everything. He has all this space to display stuff cover out and he's just letting it sit empty. I don't know, a huge window space that had almost nothing in it. A behind the counter that was relatively empty. That kind of thing.

On the other hand, he had a very sophisticated point-of-sale computer system.

Basically, he had the Powell's bookstore model, and the space to possibly pull it off. If the expenses don't kill him off first. His overhead (I'm estimated what he must be paying in loans, as well as his rent) was horrifying humongous.

I may be paying 2.10 a foot, but its only 1000 sq. ft., every inch of which is packed with material. My overhead, at a guess, is less than a third of his.

He told me a daily total that was actually higher than mine for this time of year, so maybe he can pull it off.

He didn't seem all that interested in what I had to say, (don't discount, get more comics, be generous in trade terms, fill out your store by displaying more merchandise, etc.), I think I was just some blowhard off the street to him. But that O.K. I tried.

And I learned quite a bit from him.

More bookstore visits, tomorrow....