A January road trip to Canada! Fifteen hours of driving. I logged the first part of the trip, 480 miles yesterday from Eugene Oregon to Post Falls, Idaho. If you don’t know Post Falls, it’s not surprising. It’s a little town between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. It’s my usual stopping point on the way to Lethbridge Alberta, where my fabulous mother lives.
I stop here because there’s a nice little Best Western hotel that charges less than $80 for a night’s stay in January. It’s tidy and not far off the freeway.
I know this route well; last year I made the drive three times. It goes through amazing country, the lush Willamette Valley, the spectacular Columbia Gorge (yesterday, the Columbia River west of the town of Hood River was flat glass, a thing I have never seen before). Today will take me up through Idaho, skirting Lake Pend Oreille and through one of my favorite small towns, Bonners Ferry. Then up into British Columbia, over Crowsnest Past (that takes me over the Rocky Mountains and down onto the rolling southern Alberta plains). I’ve done this trip in brutal weather, but it’s mildly winter at the moment. Rainy in Oregon, scattered snow showers in Washington. Today the forecasters promise chilly partly sunny (16F) on my Canada leg.
I’m thinking about American novelist John Steinbeck this morning, specifically his book “Travels with Charley,” not a novel but a travel memoir with his dog Charley. He has many fine things to say about a road trip but I like this observation best: “I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.”
I took today’s picture at a rest stop along Interstate 5 just south of Portland. And I like to think that, inspired by Steinbeck, I will be able to spot the romance — stately trees, so beautiful — in unexpected places.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 