Such a beautiful morning full of sunshine and quiet breezes off the river. Sleeping with the slide out retracted was not too much of a problem. Jackie took the couch-bed and I took the dinette-bed, and both dogs selected Jackie as their sleeping partner for the night. Roscoe started cosying up with me, but on second thought, quickly changed loyalties and moved over with Jackie and Louis.
We’ve been without a consistently charged GPS; we’ve got the GPS, but forgot the charging cable. Because the Garmins have such inferior batteries, they lose their charge very quickly because it’s such a graphics-dominated device. But we’ve been able to keep the thing charged up through my Acer 6-cell Li-ion battery long enough to figure out the shortest route north to Spokane, Washington. We were going to take the highway 12 route through Walla Walla (where I spent my junior year of high school: Go Blue Devils!), Lewiston, Idaho, and through the Lolo pass to Lolo, Montana, but decided against it of weather concerns: late snow was what we heard.
Instead, we took the the 395 to Spokane. Somewhere near Cheney, WA, while hitting the “seek” button over and over again, searching for a listenable FM station on the lower end of the FM band, suddenly the sound of a muted trumpet swung its way across the air waves. Miles Davis and his quartet, John Coltrane on tenor, playing the Sonny Rollins’ tune “Oleo.” Can this be so? The station was KEWU 89.5, Eastern Washington University. Listened to jazz all the way to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
We had targeted a few rv campgrounds in the surrounding area, but they all panned out to be either full or much too expensive at 40 to 50 bucks a site. We called one campground, Wolf Lodge Campground, but they were closed. They told us that if we were willing to take a water/electricity site only, they would let us stay for the night for 28 bucks cash. Turned out Jackie got us the site for 25 because she didn’t have any ones. Spent another night sleeping in tight quarters, unable to extend our slide out. Tomorrow we’re off to Christian’s in Lolo, Montana.
Call and Response 