Saturday, 23 July 2022
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| today's route - heading north again |
Google said today would be another 4-hour drive, meaning a 7-hour drive for me, so once again I got us on the road just after 7:00. It helps that sunrise in this area is soon after 5:00, so it's broad daylight when we leave.
Grangeville, pop. 3,141, was about a mile down the road, which swings at a sharp angle toward the northwest without going through the main part of town.
The road passed nonstop croplands, and once again I was entering the Nez Perce Indian Reservation.
Between Craigmont and Culdesac, the road took a 6% grade over 4 miles down a very long descent into a deep canyon.
Then we were back at Lapwai (Butterfly Land), pop. 1,134. And a sign said I was on the Northwest Passage Scenic Byway.
At a Conoco station on tribal land (by the casino) not far from Lewiston, I paid $4.40/gallon for regular, which included a 5¢ discount for paying cash. That's incredibly lower than anything I've paid for quite a while. Nearby a billboard said, "Honor the Treaties - Breach the Dams." Another vote for demolishing the obstructions to migrating salmon.
And then we were driving back into Lewiston, pop. 34,203, elev. 738'. Grangeville, where we started the morning, lies at 3,399', so in a relatively short drive we dropped more than 2,600'. You'll recall that Lewiston is Idaho's lowest point.
I'd forgotten about that truly terrible smell from the papermill here in town and wanted nothing more than to get away from it. I took the road heading north, which immediately sent me on a seriously steep hill that climbed for miles. Two problems. One is that the smell came with us, when I'd hoped we'd be able to climb out of it; the second is that no signs ever said what elevation we'd gotten to or if the hill even had a name so I could look it up for myself. All I know is that we climbed a very steep hill for a very long way.
On the radio I heard an interview with the author of a book called Rebel Without a Clause. Obviously, she's a grammarian with a sense of humor and a set of grammatical principles which weren't quite what I expected. I mention things like this book in the blog so when I finally stop traveling and have a place to put extra books and maybe even a library card, I know which ones I want to read.
I've been surprised to find that square hay bales are by far the most common in Idaho, far more than the round bales.
We came to Moscow, pop. 25,060, and stopped at an empty parking lot for the University of Idaho to take a break.
A little later I picked up a strange NPR station. First I heard an impassioned pair of men insist that they're only interested in facts, and immediately go on to say that the mainstream media is the biggest purveyor of misinformation in the world. They provided no supporting facts (you know, the things that they'd said were their only interest) but did provide an example: the mainstream media have produced nonstop information about the war in Ukraine that happens to coincide with the views of the Department of Defense and the White House, so the media are thus no more than megaphones for government. (No mention that these views might coincide because they're factually correct.) This media output has resulted, they say, in worsening recession and famine for the global south and something else that I forgot. I didn't hear them even hint that Russia having started the whole thing by invading a sovereign nation without provocation might have played a role anywhere in this, and I also never once heard an actual fact. The moderator asked only supportive questions and never once projected skepticism. So I finally turned it off. I felt like I gave them a hearing but got tired of them saying over and over that all they cared about were the facts when they never produced even one.
After a while I turned the radio back on and got this same station and heard an impassioned woman claiming NATO is the biggest problem with climate change because it's a military alliance and the military is by far the biggest polluter and NATO wants countries to build up their military spending instead of spending that money on direct climate science to address the problem. There were just too many leaps in logic in that one too, and lacked some crucial facts that might change the argument, and as with the previous segment the moderator wasn't even mildly questioning her premises, so I turned it off again. There's only so much stress I can take.
A sign told me I was entering the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation.
And I keep seeing dead deer along the road.
Today I saw alternating fields of yellow grain and green something that might be grain or maybe another crop.
Idaho has a town named Tensed, pop. 123. Okay, this is another strange name brought about by the US Postal Service. The town was first called Desmet, after the Jesuit priest De Smet who worked with the Coeur d'Alene tribe. But when the town got a post office, the PO said they should change it because the name De Smet had already been taken. So the town reversed the spelling and came up with Temsed, which the post office then decided must have been misspelled and changed it to a word they knew: Tensed. Go figure.
I saw stunning patterns of harvested grain on the hillsides. They reminded me of patterns of cornrow braids. Intricate and beautiful. And the road was winding and hilly and barely 2 lanes and there was nowhere at all I could stop and take a photo.
I saw a field of canola, and another field was labeled "garbanzo beans."
The town of Plummer didn't have a sign northbound (though I saw when I passed it that there was one southbound), but they did have a sign for Plummer Days and Car Show, which I'd just missed on July 16th.
I was passed by 20+ bikers heading south in a large group.
Litter cleanup in this area was sponsored by Grandma's Gone Wild Adventures. Of course I had to look that up and learned that I'd know more if I could access Facebook, but what I found was that they're "free-spirited fun-loving grandmas determined to live life to the fullest." Can't argue with that idea.
I knew Lake Coeur d'Alene was hiding behind hills on our right, and then as we were coming into town I got my first sight - a big beautiful lake.
Coeur d'Alene, pop. 44,137, not only has the lake but also the Spokane River. I passed a huge marina that was advertising a wood boat show.
An Idaho license plate read MDDYPWS.
Completely not separated (visibly) from Coeur d'Alene is the town of Hayden, pop. 14,133, with a large farmers market today. I passed the Pappy Boyington Field at Coeur d'Alene Airport. I knew that name sounded familiar to me so I looked him up and learned that he was a WWII hero - a flying ace pilot who received the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. And he was born here in Coeur d'Alene. Here's the Wikipedia article about his amazing life and career. https://en.wikipedia.org/Pappy-Boyington
For some reason, I never noticed this before, but today I realized several of these towns along here are twin cities: Moscow, with Pullman; Coeur d'Alene with Spokane; Sandpoint with Newport.
Not far out of town, I came to Silverwood, a giant amusement park where all the rides were operating. They say they're the Pacific Northwest's largest theme park and include a hotel. Across the highway was an RV park that should be theirs if it isn't - cater to all those grandparents who want to bring their families.
I passed a series of small towns and large lakes. Then at Sagle the car in front of me stopped suddenly for a left turn, without giving any signal, in a 55 mph zone, which of course I was doing. I came within inches of hitting that idiot.
US Highway 95 drives through Sandpoint by crossing Pend Oreille Lake. That lake's name is pronounced "ponderay," locally anyway, and that coincidentally is the name of the town just north of Sandpoint where my campground was located. Ponderay, pop. 1,150, calls itself The Little City with the Big Future.
And I made it into the campground at 1:34.
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