500 Miles

We've reached our destination...in a manner of speaking.

For those of you who have been following this blog from the beginning, you know that the 'destination' part of this trip is Seattle. The drive from Missoula to Seattle is ~475 miles; nevertheless, the original plan was to make the drive in a day. After covering over 2000 miles in 7 days, we thought we'd break that up into a two-day drive: spend some time in Couer d'Alene, ID (CDA) and stay in Spokane, WA.

We got a late start leaving Missoula. I've been purchasing post cards along the way and thought they might be better used to carry messages to our friends now instead of collecting dust on a shelf at home. We sat outside a local ice cream parlor (vacation means eating ice cream after breakfast) while I wrote half post cards. I really wanted to send them out with a Missoula post mark (have you ever recieved a post card from Missoula?). We finally got out of town right around noon.

We had a pleasant stop in CDA (classic car show, shopping, people watching, late lunch) and got back on the road again. We found ourselves in Spokane in early afternoon and decided to revert to the original plan and push on to Seattle. We made it all the way to my eldest sister's place on the Kitsap Peninsula (a ferry ride across the sound from Seattle) shortly after 10:30.

For those that may have been wondering, the children made it all the way to Ellensburg, WA before receiving their first round of discipline for the trip. The missus and I managed another 100 miles (all the way to Seattle) before our first fight. Even after that, all is well and we survived our first (and only, I hope) 500 mile day.

Thanks for reading.