Monday, July 28 – Spokane to Vancouver

Today was all driving. We left about 9:30 and arrived at Darren’s about 8. We would have been much faster except for a few stops, some construction slowdowns, and some traffic jams. Our first stop was for lunch northeast of Seattle at a McDonald’s in Kirkland. We stopped there to use the wifi to find a nearby Costco. Who would have guessed there would be a Costco in Kirkland? We had seen Blue Moon beer at the Spokane Costco on our first visit, but did not buy it. We sampled it a few times over the succeeding days and decided we would like to take some home, thus the stop.

Another stop was at an outlet mall. A few years ago we had stopped at an outlet mall in northern Washington that had a Corelle and Corning store. We needed some new plastic lids for our Pyrex bowls, and hoped to find the same store. This was not the same mall (It was on the opposite side of the highway.), but we thought we would take a wild chance that there might be one here. And guess what! There was. Not only that, but the lids were on a buy two get one free special. Mission accomplished. And right next door was another Costco with a gas station. Gas was 365.9 a gallon, compared to up to 399.9 on the highway. Now that’s more like a Costco discount.

Approaching the border, a sign said the wait at Customs was 45 minutes, and sure enough, we were within a minute or two of that. We confessed that we had an extra 24 beer and the agent waved us through.

Leaving Spokane we were in a thin forest of pines with a floor of dry grass. Further east the forest thinned out and it began to look kind of like southwest Saskatchewan around Swift Current with rolling hills and dry, short grass prairie. The difference was that there were frequent rock outcroppings. Further east there was less rock, more cropland, and more pivot irrigation. Then we got into foothills and the Cascade Mountains. These were again lower and less rugged than our Rockies and quite heavily treed.

At Darren and Sue’s we managed a short visit with the boys before bedtime and made our plans for tomorrow’s camping adventure.

Weather was great – sunny and warm with a light wind. Too nice to spend the whole day in the van.