I hope I may be excused for my lack of enthusiasm today. I found it difficult to be inspired by northern Idaho and western Montana. It isn't that it’s not beautiful country, because it is, but our route took us through no man’s land…perhaps I should call it God’s country…and how many ways can you describe pine trees? I think I have done it all several times, already. The first photo will show you that even Beamer got bored. And I have to say, compared to yesterday, being in the snow-covered mountains of Mt. Rainer National Park…well…this just didn’t hit a home run for me. It reminded me of the Hainesville Woods in Maine, the one they wrote about in a song. I’m talking about Rt. 2 that starts in Idaho and goes on for miles and miles. We drove 120 of those miles today to Kalispell, MT. And it proved to be rather monotonous.

We left Ellensburg at 8:00 AM, 61 degrees and we headed east on I-90. It took us through the Columbia Basin in eastern Washington State. It is a mix of desert and prairie land (much like the southwest) and farm land. We drove through in the morning when the fields were being irrigated by those now familiar sprinkler systems that are as wide as the fields and sometimes pivot on a point in the center of the field, and sometimes are moved around manually to different parts of the field. The water comes from drainage from the Columbia River. And judging by the amount of acreage being watered, it must be plentiful. We saw corn and grain and potatoes and other crops we could not identify from the highway. The clerk at the hotel told Steve they even grow hops in that area.

Further east we drove through Spokane and at 11:00 AM Pacific time we crossed over to Idaho and the mile marker told us that the distance from Seattle to the eastern border of Washington is exactly 300 miles. We visited Coeur D’Alene in Idaho then turned north and drove almost to Canada before taking Rt. 20 through the woods to Montana. We passed Lake Pend Oreille and I began to understand that there is definitely a French influence in this area.

We crossed into Montana at 1:45 Pacific time and entered the Mountain time zone and we instantly lost an hour. Our drive took us along the Kootenai River, through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. We passed tiny little towns and one not so tiny, where almost every building was a casino…most the size of a postage stamp.

We even saw the Boisvert Camp on Lake McGregor, a large beautiful lake surrounded by, yet again, tall pines, and little else. (For those who do not know, Boisvert was my name before I married Steve.) Those French Canadians are everywhere.

We arrived in Kalispell, MT around 5 PM. Tomorrow, Glacier National Park. And I promise better photos and a better blog entry. Idaho...check.