One State Down

We made it--to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Sunday night, 3 couples from church came over to help us finish packing the kitchen and some other odds and ends (or did they just come to bring us supper & share it with us?).

Yesterday was . . . crazy, I guess would fit. We picked up the truck in the morning and made it back to have lunch at our neighbour's house. People started arriving before noon--and the truck was probably packed by 3pm. I think there were about a dozen people at different points. We had to leave behind a few non-essential items that wouldn't fit in the truck. With better planning, we could have got more in, but it was difficult with so many hands and brains trying to work together. Oh well--we've got enough stuff. A few people stayed and helped clean the house (I'm not going to try and name all the names through this--rest assured, we know who they are and appreciate them very much). And throughout the day a few people stopped by to drop off treats and toys for the boys for travelling. Some friends took us out for supper (Moby Dick's for fish & chips at the beach . . . a fairly quintessential last supper before leaving the Pacific Northwest).

We got up and finished things in the house . . . and tried to cram a few last things in the truck so that the car wasn't overly packed. Then off to the border. Customs went fairly well. They x-rayed the truck and our car (don't ask: I'm not sure how it was done--they made us go inside). It took a little longer because we had 4 houseplants with that we were trying to bring back (one that my parents gave Beth for her 21st birthday and another from my grandfather's funeral); they ended up in the incinerator, I guess (you have to have some certificate of clearance saying they're not diseases or anything to bring them back in the US, even though they lived in the US for over a decade in one case, and were never more than 2 miles from the US border).

The western part of Washington is beautiful. Evergreens, mountains, Peugeot Sound. We made it through the big pass east of Seattle. One of the mountain towns had about 8 feet of snow on the ground. We saw a little snow, but the roads were cleared.

The majority of the state as you travel it's width, is pretty plain. We felt like we'd already been through the Dakotas (though it's more desert-like--a tumble-weed ran in front of the truck at one point). The big highlight was the 14-mile stretch where they put signs along the fences letting you know what crops are being grown in the fields (though not much was growing right now, obviously--and they didn't have much labeled). I think it's a wonderful idea for agricultural areas to educate people (agrication, as I call it)--though in a lot of places the signs would only be field corn and soybeans, so I guess that'd get old pretty quickly. We saw potatoes, peppermint, field corn, sweet corn, timothy hay, alfalfa and green manure.

And now, we're back in the mountains. We've gotten through Washington. Only 4 more States to go (only in the west--or in Canada--could you travel 2000 miles and only get through 5 States; and really, we're only going through 70 miles of Idaho).

That's all for tonight--gotta get rested up for another day.