November 17 -- Made It to the West Coast!

When I woke up, I looked out the motel window and was amazed at the view. Mountains! With this dramatic backdrop, the Inn provided a breakfast of pancakes and sausages in the parking lot prepared by a cowboy with a grill!


I hit the road at 7:30, in order to make it to Seattle in time for dinner. The highway through the rest of Montana, past Butte and Missoula to the Idaho border, was mountainous and pretty, although hard fully to appreciate after a while because of clouds and rain.

The drive through Idaho was very short. For part of the time I was driving above the clouds! Coeur d’Alene , the only major Idaho destination I drove through, seemed a very attractive place; I later came to learn that it’s a center of Neo-Nazism, so perhaps it’s a superficial beauty only.


From Spokane to Seattle, via towns such as Cheney and Fishtrap, the weather was very bad. Heavy rains and dark clouds created night-like conditions at times. The water puddled on the roads and one car hydroplaned right off the highway. With all the water, it looked like I was driving though broad, green farmland. I now understand that normally the landscape is desert!

A big surprise was the incline on the last set of passes through the Cascades. The Mini pulled strongly up the mountain roads despite the grade; sharp eyes were important because there were, in fact, large fallen rocks in the “Fallen Rock” zones. Yikes! The snow beside the road at the top of the pass and the heavy rains made me glad it was not just a few degrees cooler, in which case the range would have been impassible.


The downpour stopped a little more than an hour from Seattle. The skies became clear and the lights of the city twinkled, arrayed in different colors on hills and around the water.

I was fortunate to be able to stay in Seattle with a family that had lived right around the corner from mine when we were in London in the 1970’s. I had no trouble finding the house that Skip (the dad) shares with his partner Zanny.

When I arrived, Jenny, my exact contemporary (within 10 days), and I went out to a terrific Vietnamese restaurant, Tamarind Tree, and then on to a place called the B&O for coffee and sinful desserts. We hadn’t seen each other in four years or more, and it was great to catch up.