Day three

The Gumbies on the ferry Friday. They're been all over the world with me

Mountain time today. 649 miles from Hope, ID, through mountains with lovely lakes, Glacier National Park, rain, softening landscape in MT. Farming in valleys sheltered by mountains, to wheat plains, to dry bumpy mounds with scrub grass. The houses are tucked into folds in the hills, some folds have groups of horses.

Eastern with smoke from the forest fires...I could smell it yesterday in ID. My shiny car is no longer clean

Found a cool truck in Spokane, selling all kinds of home made food...I finished the recommended Mac and Cheese with bacon for dinner tonight. After having to take I90 on Saturday (only yesterday) to avoid the forest fires in WA, I took SR 2 through Spokane and along that amazing glacial lake. No highways today, although the speed limit on 2 is 70...potentially scary, especially through all the construction.

My car survived the night, parked in front of June's house...the dog treed a quite large bear in back of the house before dinner

Little towns in the middle of plains of wheat in MT...baked by sun, and probably buried in winter snow...only gravel roads and a couple of grain elevators...long tanker trains of oil and coal trains...black tank cars silhouetted against the horizon. Not too many people to complain about possible threats...so many places I've driven: road, RR tracks, water on one side, hills on the other. I could not live so far from an edge, but there are whole lives and dramas occurring out here in the middle of the country.

June and Mike's pretty house in the woods above Hope, ID. I've been eating cherries from their trees today

I'm thinking about art work in the subtle colors of the fields, the light edge of a field against the sky...one of my iconic images...layers, textures...It's hard to capture the ever-changing images...I tear pictures out of travel brochures...the large round bales repeated over miles of fields...in Eastern WA, it's large boxy bales stacked under white plastic quonset hut things. Even my projected 37 days is not enough to take it all in.

North Central MT looks something like Iowa, something like Eastern, WA

 

 

 

 
The patterns repeat, with variations. I'm glad I decided to do this...especially avoiding the thruways as much as possible. Seeing all this USof A gives me a more sound sense of where I am in the world...happy to be living between my Mountains and salt water, in the cool blue north...

I read about this in one of my books...on Route 2 before Wolf Point...I've seen LOTS of other stuff, too

9:37pm Mountain Time...time to sleep and get up early and drive to Fargo. I saw a series of hills sporting a wide variety of animals (fiberglass?) We do like, we weird ones, Roadside Attractions...keep the public on their toes.