August 8th, 2018
Spokane, WA
No roadside fun this day. I uncharacteristically sleepy almost eight hours and got a late start. The $2 off coupon breakfast at the Holiday Inn did not intrigue, so I set off in search of…I…um… Okay, certain parties have used my affection for Panera to accuse me of being under the influence of Big Breakfast. It’s just not true! I can quit anytime I want, but a cross country road trip is no time to address one’s addictive nature.
But there was no Panera and Google maps lead me to the Great Harvest Bread Company. This was a small place with just 5-6 counter seats. As I walked in a friendly lady offered me a choice of one of four breads to sample. I was expected a small piece just to be able to taste it, but she carved me off a large slab of sourdough and pointed me to a nearby pound of butter. Honestly, that slab of buttered bread and coffee probably would have satisfied, but I ordered their only breakfast item, a standard egg, bacon, and cheddar sangie, which was excellent and served to me by a very friendly kid about twenty. A white kid with dreadlocks. So very at place in Missoula.
I was turning up the onramp to I-90 at 8:04. I exited I-90 at Argonne Street in Spokane at 10:04 local, three hours later.
It was an interesting trip that I am quite glad is over. After forty hours of driving over 5 1/2 days, I’m ready to get up in the morning and not have to drive all day. One interesting aspect was the speed limit, which got progressively faster the farther west I got, from an annoying low 65 MPH in New York (aggressively enforced, I might add), to 80 MPH in North Dakota and Montana, before dropping back to 75 MPH in Washington. Fifteen more miles per hour over a 6-7 hour drive makes a big difference on a 2,800 mile drive.
State Speed Limits
And geographically it was interesting. From the once glaciated north, I skirted the north edge of the beautiful Finger Lakes region, then threaded between Lake Erie on the north and the Ohio Valley on the left. I next pushed into the industrial heartland of the north, turning right at the bottom edge of Lake Michigan. Industry gave way to agriculture and forestry in heavily wooded Wisconsin which eventually turned to dairy in northern Wisconsin, then to cattle in northern Minnesota and North Dakota, where the tall grass prairie is better suit to beeves than milk. Western North Dakota had some interesting badlands. Mostly farming in eastern Montana, then becoming more mountainous in the western part of the state and crossing the Continental divide at Butte, then pretty much downhill to Coeur d’Alene. Forty minutes after CDA I was at my new house on the western edge of the Rockies and just north of the Palouse.
Another quirk of the trip was that, with the exception of searching for odd statuary and using local streets where I ate or stayed, the entire trip was on two roads. After my first hour driving south to Liverpool, the entire trip was on I-90. I headed west on I-90 on Day 1 and only left it several miles from home when I exited at Argonne Street in Spokane. It just goes to show that…well, I don’t know what it shows, but there it is.
So I end this series as I began it: Retired at last. Ahh.