Spokane

My brother mentioned this past winter that he may have a job in Spokane sometime in the spring. The job materialized and I decided to roll out to Eastern Washington for a couple of days to meet up with my bro.

I had envisioned some camping, hiking and who knows what else, but then I sprained my ankle, so I had to pair back on my plans. I left Seattle on Thursday morning on my way up to the Salish Lodge for a meeting. It was pouring rain and it didn't let up all day. Around 5pm, I got out of the meeting and made the drive to Spokane. It is pretty boring country if you ask me, although I still find it amazing that you can have so much rain on one side of a mountain range and almost a desert on the other side. There is nothing on the East Coast similar to this.

I made it into Spokane around 9:30pm and we went out to the Onion for a couple beers and some food. The next day we hoped in my car and drove to Idaho for a tour around Lake Coeur D Alene. We pulled into a small park and noticed an interactive trail. It was only 3 miles and the grade looked real easy, so we decided to go for it. We grabbed two brochures and began our tour of Mineral Ridge. It was an old prospecting ridge and there was evidence of mining. The brochure turned out to be pretty interesting, with each stop marked with a sign and an entry in the brochure.

After that, we continued our drive around the lake, which turned out to take a long time, since there are some many inlets. Once we reached the city of Coeur D Alene we took a road north towards Priest Lake. By this time, the weather had turned from cloudy to rain and we never got out of the car to check out Preist Lake.

Back at the hotel in Spokane, we relaxed for awhile and then went out for dinner and ended up at a college bar for some drinks. We went back to the hotel and had to get up at 5:00am to drop my bother off at the airport. I headed back to Seattle and along the way stopped along the Columbia River to snap a couple of photos. I also darted into the Petrified Forest along I-90 and checked out a couple of petrified trees.

I was pretty impressed with Spokane. I had never really spent anytime in that part of Washington, expect to drive through to Seattle form the East Coast. For some reason I was expecting an old industrial city, but the city was nice with a beautiful waterfront park which I didn't get a chance to investigate.