Return to Washington

The wi-fi at this hotel is better than the one yesterday, but it's still not great. Our photos are uploading extremely slowly, and we're still waiting on some of the better ones from yesterday.

But what a relief today was! First, when we woke up, the wind was gone. We still had quite a bit of Montana to cover, but now we could relax and enjoy the scenery while doing so.

At lunchtime we pulled into Missoula. This was neat for me, because I remember being on the campus of the University of Montana 24 years ago, along with about 1200 other high schoolers, for the national Episcopal Youth Event. We tried to get onto campus to take a few photos there, but we couldn’t find a legal place to park—not on campus, and not even in the residential neighborhoods surrounding the campus, which were carefully zoned for the residents only. We only got this one shot of the mountain, with its big “M.” It is a common practice in this terrain to put the initial of the school on the nearest mountain.

Finally, in the mid-afternoon, we came to the edge of Montana. We stopped at a rest area near Lookout Point, and then we took all of Idaho in one stretch, continuing on to Spokane. After two days of Montana, it only took us an hour to get through the panhandle of my former home state! Coeur D’Alene was especially breathtaking.

In Spokane, we settled into our hotel room and then walked down by the river, an especially neat walk in this town. Then we met Christy’s friend and former boss Kathleen and her wife Mimi for dinner at a burger joint called The Onion. Reminiscences were shared, friendships strengthened.

I can’t express how exciting it is just to be across the Washington border, even though we know we still have 350 miles to cover tomorrow to get to our new home. We also have the uncertainty regarding our moving trailer (see the drama from a few days ago). It’s on its way, but will U-Pack still be able to deliver on July 2 as promised? July 3 would be totally understandable, but after that things start to get very inconvenient. Let’s hope they’ve been playing catch-up all this time, though no doubt they have had to deal with the same windy conditions we did.

Sarah was especially ecstatic tonight. She wants to see her grandparents and lots of other familiar people and sights. She also wants to see her new home, her new school, her new church, her new neighborhood. And I’m very excited to show all these things to her and to Christy, and to learn much more about them myself.