Coeur d' Alene

At Coeur d' Alene RV Resort, Post Falls, Idaho...

The leg from Butte to Coeur d' Alene was just under 300 miles today, and it felt like it. We weren't physically tired so much as just tired of being on the road. We decided to bypass Glacier National Park this trip, as we do not want to give it the short shrift that we did Yellowstone in order to meet our arrival schedule in Seattle. We hope to return next August and add Banff, Lake Louise, Jasper and environs to that trip when we don't have a deadline. In any case, we will time it when all the kids have gone back to school. That should lessen the crush of tourists, we hope.

We had intended to stay overnight in Missoula, but there wasn't a space to be had in any RV park there. This underscored one of the biggest surprises of this trip, namely, the difficulty in finding room in the RV parks. Never before in our ten years of RVing have we had so many park operators turn down our reservation because their spaces were all full. Why, in previous years, we rarely bothered with reservations at all, and we don't remember being turned away anywhere. Nowadays, we don't dare leave one place without making sure we have a reservation at the next one. Must be the lower fuel prices.

We enjoyed the drive on I-90 alongside the Clark Fork River for most of the way to Coeur d' Alene. (By the way, am I the only one who never bothered to ask the meaning of Coeur d' Alene until now? Well, according to Google, it is thought to be the name that French fur traders gave to the native Indians. Literally, its French translation is "heart of the awl." An awl, of course, is a handheld punch with a sharp end, and the term signifies the fur traders' respect for the Indians' sharp negotiating skills.) 

As is customary on travel days, we stopped after about an hour or so to have breakfast/lunch in Phannie. This usually turns out to be a sandwich of some kind (a favorite is tuna salad, but today we had ham), sweetly fixed by Sandy. This, of course, is what she should be doing, this being women's work and all. I call them "pink things." (No, I really don't have a death wish; remember, I have to take care of all the yucky things--which we call "blue things" outside the RV. She doesn't even know where to find the blue things, and that's okay with me.)

Coeur d' Alene is a lovely city built right at the shore of Lake Coeur d' Alene. Besides being in a beautiful location, it is also a very clean city, with one of the liveliest downtown nightlife scenes we have ever seen. There are flowers everywhere, and many large and manicured public parks. Who wouldn't want to live here?



Lake Coeur d' Alene
 

For dinner, we ate at the Asian Twist, a storefront restaurant run by a local family. We had a wonderful stir-fried veggie dish with chicken and some Thai fried rice. This place goes immediately onto the favorites list.



Dishes at the Asian Twist

That's about it for today; Kennewick, WA is next.

Thank you, Lord, for this wonderful life; please forgive me If fail to appreciate it enough each day.