Sunday August 12 - Baymont by Wyndham, Spokane Valley , WA

We wake to clear blue skies with a couple of little white fluffies peacefully floating.

We like Whitefish!  It’s a real nice resort town in the Rocky Mountains of northwest Montana and one of the gateways to the jagged peaks, lakes and glacier-carved valleys of Glacier National Park.

On our way west to Washington we choose the scenic route SH2, not the I90 even though the GPS wants us to go that way.

Montana to us is lots of trees, high hills, lovely scenery, huckleberries, good well cared for roads and modern towns.  It has loads of lakes and we drive past a chain of them, named McGregor, Thompson, Ranbow, Crystal, Horseshoe and Loons and lots more.

Montana

After we drive through Libby and still in Montana we get back into smoke haze from the wildfires in Kootenai National Forest to the north of us.  Then we take the Wild Horse Trail Scenic Byway to drive through Idaho.

We are slowed to a stop along the open road as a car coming the other way stops to retrieve two plastic kayaks which have come adrift (hah, nice play on words, get it) from the roof rack.  They still looked whole so hopefully they didn’t sustain too much damage.

Amazing carved eagle

Then we notice we have lost an hour, it is now 11.30am, it was 12.30 just a minute ago.

At Sandpoint we continue west on SH2.  We see three dead raccoons on the road side, obviously been hit by cars, possibly a family as they were so close together.  Very sad, they are so cute!

We continue driving south west towards Spokane with a pit stop so Kim can get fuelled up on McDonalds, then we are only an hour from our home for tonight.  It’s a nice hotel in it’s own little town (Spokane Valley) a little ways outside of Spokane itself and there is a wide choice of eating options here for later. And the hotel offers complimentary freshly baked cookies which we had to try. I went down to use the office centre to print out our flight confirmations but the computer is currently inoperable.  The same company owns the Super 8 next door and they sent me over there to do my printing but their PCs don’t have USB plugs either.

We are in for an early night tonight, we have had a long drive today and we got an extra hour so it feels later than the clock says.  We have another big drive tomorrow to get back to the Washington coast but then a couple of cruisy days before we fly down to LA.  We are getting this hotel booking in advance down to a fine art but it is still time consuming.  Would be easier if we stayed in one place for more than a night I guess but then we wouldn’t see so much or cover so much ground.

We can't be bothered going out for food so we snack on our cheese and crackers and call it dinner.