road muse – an improvised trip across the US

This will be my last post before we reach the West Coast – we will be in Seattle today!

I still have Wyoming, Yellowstone, and many other things to post about, which I will do once I have time to sort through the mountains of photos I took.   But I wanted to give you an “up to the minute” report.

So I am feverishly writing before the maid kicks us out of our motel room in Spokane – not where we expected to be as of 5 o’clock yesterday.    You see, we tried to camp last night in Idaho – it’s a long story.   We drove to Coeur d’Alene (from Missoula, Montana) and went directly to the visitors’ center to find out about camping spots in the area.   Strangely, there were very few; mostly RV parks and boat-access-only campgrounds, and expensive-looking log cabin-ish bed and breakfasts.   We would have considered a place like La Quinta, but they were all full.   (Being in our day-to-day roadmuse haze, we had completely forgotten that it was a holiday weekend, duh!)

Anyway, we drove to Farragut State Park, north of Coeur d’Alene, hoping that at least there would be some tent sites left.   There were – 2 out of the 300 in the park – but they were both in the middle of a horse corral.   Not wanting to be woken all night by Lottie’s growls at every sigh and hoof beat the horses made, and not being crazy about the smell of horse manure mixed with our fireside meal, we declined.   We also declined to stay in the “RV Theme Park Campground” on the side of the highway on our back to town.   Call me fussy, but camping next to a giant rollercoaster with onion-ring retching adolescents isn’t really my idea of getting back to nature.

So we left Idaho for Washington State, Spokane being only 30 miles away.  Thus Idaho was a blur – we were literally there for only a couple of hours, having driven into the northern sliver of the state.   We saw some scenery, of course

and an alarming amount of these billboards depicting the decaying mouths of meth addicts

(A strange contrast to the healthy-looking silver-haired couples strolling the streets of Coeur d’Alene, wearing expensive denim and other chic Western garb.)

Once in Spokane, we checked into our Comfort Inn (free apples in the lobby!) and went straight to a park nearby so Lottie could play for a while (until we got creeped out because it was getting dark and no one else was there and those meth billboards were still haunting the dark, road-weary corners of our minds…)

OK, the maid just knocked again, these musings will have to continue from the Pacific Coast.  Westward ho!