Be warned: cell service in the northwest is pretty awful. Ever since Oregon I have had trouble uploading my posts and each one takes days to find a good spot with a decent signal. Several times I’ve set the essay to go online while at a traffic light in a larger city as the countryside has service good for calls and texts but never enough to simply text pictures. We don’t spend much time in cities unfortunately.
It’s a pity because this countryside we are passing through is quite beautiful and I’d like to post more pictures. The above is on the shore of an inlet of Lake Pend Oreille (“dangling ear” in French) near Sandpoint in Idaho and not very far from Canada. A 94 degree afternoon we had yesterday so it’s not always freezing around here!
We had a brilliant morning in Moscow on the eastern edge of the Palouse where we spent a night in a lovely county park with electrical hookups for just $10 (the senior rate). The electricity was useful as we ran the air conditioning hard to beat the heat before sunset. I walked Rusty all over the park which was empty and lovely and then I noticed he was shaking his head incessantly.
I looked inside the ear with a flashlight and saw nothing but clearly it hurt. The Moscow Animal Clinic and Hospital fit us in the next day and naturally we had an anxious night wondering what was wrong with our always healthy hound. Had there been a piece of obvious grass in his ear I’d have felt better but as it was I wondered what was wrong.
Moscow is a lovely town and efficient. Before the vet appointment I got my hair cut (in a mask) I washed GANNET2 at a self service car wash and we picked up curbside groceries. After the vet we walked into a tire shop and got the tires rotated. In between we bought some really excellent scones from a store in the very pretty tree covered downtown.
The vet was excellent and found nothing either which increased my anxiety -a brain tumor obviously- but she took a swab and diagnosed a mild ear infection laughing off my worries. For the next week Rusty has to suffer a pill a day and a squirt of medicine in his ears for $167. He is not at all happy but it was the best money we’ve spent in a while. He’s already stopped shaking his head, but he can easily recognize the dreaded squirt bottle and he tries to run.
We left Moscow before lunch with everything done. I was slightly amazed at such efficiency and not a little sorry to be rushing through this community.
I am tired like everyone else of Covid and I wish mask wearing were a normal thing in the US like it is in Mexico where we lived a normal life, but I am taking notes and when we get back from South America I want to do a tour of the cities we are largely by-passing. Modern American small towns have a lot more to offer in terms of culture, entertainment, food and the arts than I can enjoy in a lifetime and to feel obliged to pass them by is wearing on me. People confuse me. I’m told Mexico is dangerous (it’s not) but crowding together and risking long covid for the sake of conformity isn’t. It’s as well I’m retired and free to slip through life unnoticed.
However the good news is the underpopulated countryside and wild camping opportunities are second to none, except perhaps Colorado. Driving around here is delightful, and the roads are perfectly smooth and well marked.
I spotted a stray dog, a rail thin German Shepherd loping alongside Highway 95. He was scared and ran from me and hid. We tried for a long while in the heat to entice him, but eventually we drove ahead in the direction he was traveling. We put out food and water on the path we expected him to follow and called the Coeur d’Alene dispatch. I knew what to say. Yes he’s a danger to traffic. I had noted exactly where he is. They promised to send animal control. I hope they found him.
Those sort of encounters don’t sit well with me but there’ a more to being an adult than paying the bills. You have to keep on keeping on. I can’t stop thinking about him nonetheless.
Driving up Idaho’s western edge we saw farmland and pine forests, tall mountains and sheer cliffs. I kept checking altitude but I don’t think US Highway 95 reached 3,000 feet on my app. We felt like we were in high altitude similar to the Rockies in Colorado. We weren’t.
This is wheat central and it’s pretty obvious when you drive through there is a lot of attention paid to the crop.
Google Maps went nuts. It’s the second time in ten months and it wasn’t terrible but it was annoying. The blue line said turn off the highway so we did and ran into a railroad crossing. That should have been a warning! Do not go here…
We left behind the highway, the wheat fields and the farm work and entered a slightly off putting pine forest.
I kept thinking this was not a great place to camp but just one night…and on the edge of this long lake with the odd name… we can make this work.
No we couldn’t. We drove past homes that looked like off grid survivalist camps, fences with tons of No Trespassing signs and all sorts of goats and chickens ready to cope with the last days of civilization... It didn’t help we both knew that northern Idaho is the redoubt of anti government nutters and my wife the Jew was busy denying she felt any anxiety. We just allowed ourselves to get spooked. It happens.
The dirt road looped out to the lake which we could glimpse through the No Trespassing signs. Clearly we were off base here. Driving out of this subdivision was like being a kid in the dark suddenly losing his nerve, and slowly gathering speed and not daring to look over our shoulders as we got out of there. Sometimes your imagination just gets the better of you and we were as idiotic as anyone might be when their brains run away with them. Duh.
It was really quite a pretty forest and I doubt there was an ogre to be found. Idiots. We got back on the highway and ignored Google maps when it made one last annoying attempt to derail us. Google’s brain and our brain frying simultaneously made for one long tiring day.
We bypassed Sandpoint and drove on to a Forest Service boat ramp listed on iOverlander. Free camping in a parking lot permitted for three days with only a pit toilet for company. I’ve never seen a porta potty with a snow roof before. We miss out on a lot in Florida.
It was a surprisingly scenic spot (we parked a hundred yards from the loo) and until the mosquitoes came out at dusk, quite charming. I went a little mad with my camera and made postcards in all directions.
The original name French fur traders used for this lake was Pend D’Oreille which means “dangles from the ear,” However the D’ is subtle to the English speaking ear and it’s been dropped. So now it’s “dangling ear.” Fair enough but why? It turns out the fur traders met Native Americans with long earrings or decorations hence the name.
They call themselves a name that translates phonetically into English as “Kalispell” which is a name you will see around here. Then there are the Salish too. But the lake got the dangling ear French name.
Coeur d’Alene is even worse. It’s a big city for these parts, 50,000 people and a bustling economy. However the name in French means Heart of the Awl and I had no idea what “Alene” means, as sharp carpentry tools don’t come up much in conversation, even in French. It turns out the French traders were impressed by the sharp pointy tools of the Skitswish people, one of five tribes in modern Idaho. Coeur d’Alene is now known rather unromantically as CDA because we live in a world where effort is better ignored in favor of speed and convenience. I don’t suppose Skitswish rolls off the tongue fast enough to satisfy 21st century English speakers. See Dee Ay it is then. No need to bother to learn the pronunciation.
This spot is a former drift yard, a gathering places for the rolling logs of which we saw a few abandoned in the water:
Nowadays the logs are hauled by impatient truckers. When unloaded they put the trailer wheels on top of the tractor making for a speedier return to the lumber supply for another load. They don’t mess around.
On to Montana. I liked Idaho.
