I'm going to repeat this, just so there's no question in anybody's mind. There's a hell of a lot of Montana.

We pulled out of Gardiner tuesday morning and finished up the whole Montana experience. We crossed the continental divide at something like 6390 feet or so, just east of Butte. We went through Missoula, etc. etc. What do you want me to say? (Other than, when in Livingston, Montana, be sure to check out Sasquatch Taxidermy, "we buy antlers.")

Then we blew through Idaho in about an hour and spent the night in Spokane, Washington. (When in Spokane be sure to eat at Beans and Rice and Jesus Christ, for all your complete protein and salvation needs.)

Today we crossed Washington. This was as close to actual bad weather as we came, maybe edging out the weird snow flurry blizzards from North Dakota. The weather really has been magnificent anyplace we've been on this trip. I can't speak for what happened after we left. Or for Rockville either, where as I write this, our house is apparently being washed away. Even going through the Rockies, it was like in the 50s and sunny. Today, though, it was partly cloudy with scattered showers over the Pacific northwest. The key word there is "scattered." For reasons i can't really figure out, you can see a really, really long way in central Washington. I know, I know, the reasons you can see farther in some places than others are pretty trivial - fewer obstructions to your sightlines. But I'd never seen anything quite like today. You'd see clouds off in the distance that were raining the cold hell out of someplace that looked like it was maybe a hundred yards off but obviously wasn't. Then there'd be other clouds over you that weren't raining, or it would be sunny and raining at the same time. We only got hit a couple times, once going through Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades, and a time or two going north past Seattle.




Most of the time though it was really lovely weather, sunny with all these gorgeous armadas of clouds running by. We saw some cool stuff, like the Columbia River gorge, which was amazing and amazingly windy (That's Elisa at the gorge above), and Snoqualmie Pass itself. In some ways the Cascades were even more impressive than the Rockies, which I guess are a lot more forbidding in the only other place I've seen them, Colorado. This time, we were clearly among mountains, and the altitude number on my GPS receiver kept going up. But then suddenly we were at the Continental Divide and I was like, what, already? That's it? Hmm, okay. The mountains around us in Snoqualmie looked much more impressive, even though the whole mess was actually only a couple thousand feet above sea level.

Seattle has traffic problems as it turns out. We approached the city from the east on I-90 and turned north on the 405 through Bellevue (actually bypassing Seattle proper completely). Had we not counted as a carpool and qualified for the HOV lane, we would have been really stuck. Were stuck once the HOV lane ceased to exist. Afternoon traffic leaving Seattle runs all the way out to Everett before trailing off. Then we went the rest of the way up the coast to Bellingham, a nice, hilly little granola and lumberjack kind of town. There's a Linux festival in the works. We had a good dinner at a little microbrewery downtown. I like Bellingham.

Tomorrow we assault the Canadian border. It's Vancouver or bust.