Day 16 – Sunday : Kootenai to Richland (565 km) Karen had recommended stopping at Kootenai falls. I’m so glad she did. I’d have undoubtedly driven straight past otherwise. A short hike leads down to terraces of ancient fossilised rippled sand next to waterfalls and rapids along the river. The railroad also runs parallel – between the highway and the river. I love the sound of the US train horns – there is something mournful and distant about them.
A wobbly rope bridge crosses the river.
The rock the other side has different patterns – swirly. And if you are interested in geology you get an additional treat when you look back up towards the highway – the rocks reveal themselves to be folded nearly 90 degrees by the power of plate tectonics.
During this part of the journey we seem to be alternately heading north then south by hundreds of miles rather than heading straight west. This is definitely not the optimum route to take if your business was driving between Tennessee and Washington, but we are making the most of the scenery and the opportunity.
Now in Idaho we are getting a bit too close to the Canadian border again, so turn south on US-95 through Bonners Ferry.
It occurs to me that we need to catch up with our communication. Wherever we stop we have no cell signal. My wireless air card / mobile wifi hotspot thing was great for Norway, but I’m not sure which cell carriers it has a roaming agreement with in the US, but it obviously isn’t one that covers small towns in the wilderness parts of the US. I am concerned that Chet will be worried about us since he hasn’t heard anything since we had that tyre blow, and that Captain PJ (Pete Walsh) in Tacoma will be wondering about our schedule, since we are planning to meet up at the end of the week. It is pretty much lunchtime and we are near a lake – there must be somewhere nice down the lake front to stop for a sandwich, take in the view and check our messages.
South down US-95, then across a causeway stretching out over Lake Pend Oreille. No lake-side lunch stops jump out of us. Over the lake we take the first right turn over the railroad tracks and head along the edge of the lake for several miles. We are disappointed. The lake front is all private property with no obvious places to stop. And Sally’s cell signal had disappeared.
As a finally resort we stop in a supermarket carpark in Coeur D’Alene which is a large enough city to give me a good cell signal. I check my emails and facebook too. There is a communicator conversation that had been running for several days between Pete, Chet, Bryan and Brian along the lines of “Where’s Steve, he’s not replying to my messages?” “He left us a week ago” “Do you know when he is getting to Tacoma?” etc. I am glad I hadn’t left it any longer to get in touch.
West onto I-90 we follow the Spokane River through the city of the same name. We stop at Sprague to refilled with diesel – the price had now crept up to nearly $3.
The next river is the Columbia. We cross it and circle around Richland.
There is a reason why I have come all the way south to here. At Richland is the visitors’ centre for the Hanford B reactor. One of the reasons for stopping to get an internet connection was to find out if it was possible to get onto a tour of the reactor. Thankfully I was able to book a tour online for early tomorrow. Because the tour is going to be fairly early I decide we should find out where the visitors’ centre is now – I don’t want to miss the tour as I struggled to find the location in the morning.
We find the visitors’ centre in a new business park on the edge of town. They have a gravel parking lot around the back, and we decide we’ll boondock there tonight.
It is a warm 88F, but the fantastic fan lives up to its name. In order to be discrete we don’t deploy the slide – a nice feature of the Lance 1161 is being able to use it without any difficulty with the slide in. Rather than cook inside the already hot camper, we pay a visit to the adjacent restaurant / brewing company and watch the sun go down from an air-conditioned table.
The waitress serves us using her broken wrist – a casualty of punching her car steering wheel. We definitely aren’t going to argue with her.
