She Said:Mara's friend Lexie is staying just south of Coeur D'Alene so Brad dropped us off at their cabin on the beach while he went to pick up the flooring we ordered from Home Depot. It was a beautiful 3 story cabin with a lawn and beach that they were renting with some family friends. We had a lovely morning going canoeing and the kids were catching catfish with a net. It's a beautiful lake with a mix of luxury mansions and humble A-frame cottages. I'm sure the humble A-frames are still worth $300,000. Apparently a bunch of celebrities and sports stars have property there. Wayne Gretzky's is rumored to have two pools - one above the other - with a water slide joining them. We headed to Spokane for lunch at P.F. Chang's. It is such good food and beautifully prepared and presented. I don't know why we don't have any in Canada. Oh wait - we do. Only in Toronto and Quebec. Then we went to Mobius Kids Museum and Science Centre. It was fun. Then searching for a 7-11 that wasn't lined up or out of free slurpees took up a bit of time until we headed north.
We were just heading into a town before Coulee Dam and traffic stopped. I looked ahead and saw a diaper-only, barefoot 2 yr old in the grass beside the highway following a dog. I thought at first it was just a kid from one of the vehicles ahead of us going to a pee - it was confusing. Then a woman from a car near us jumped out of her car and hurried to the kid with open arms and a friendly face so as not to frighten him and I clued in. This was a kid who had wandered away from home or nearby campsite and had followed his puppy to the highway. As the faster thinking lady picked him up I saw the panicked mom come rushing over. Whew! What a scene. Grateful grateful grateful.
Kids had napped until we were an hour away from Omak when we woke them to grab a snack at Safeway. We got sandwiches and a candy treat. And by the time we got to the hotel I was convinced that the sugar/hyperactivity link is no myth. Or maybe the chemicals and food dyes, but whatever it is the kids were insane. Just wired and giggly and public embarrassments. So what better place to take them than the hotel pool. They made short work of evacuating the 2 other groups that were enjoying a peaceful swim. Ha!
He Said:Ah yes, the flooring. I haven't mentioned that yet. Due to the prolonged years of renovation, we reach the end of the basement to learn we were a couple boxes short and it's been discontinued in Canada for quite some time. Home Depot US had it though. All attempts to get it here failed, yadda yadda, eventually I had to drive to the states, by an US home depot gift card from a US store, THEN order it online for pickup in a store somewhere along our vacation route. Still - managed to fit 5 boxes of flooring and 24' of eco border in with no noticeable impact to our interior space. Much as I like to give myself credit for packing, ya gotta love that van. Anyway. I'm dragging out an uninteresting story. It's true - we failed to get a free 7-11 slurpee. first time ever. That's something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my days.
PF Chang's is amazing food. I want to open one in Edmonton. It's excellent. Mobius Science, also excellent. Highly interactive, highly modern. Ryan was obsessed with the station where you could lock a pop bottle, flood it with water, pump air in, then launch it. If it hit the ceiling it splashed water back down. They had interesting magnet displays. Even a full length touch table that had very detailed 3d scans of accident victims, where you could view the muscle, skeleton, or skin layer, zoom, rotate, see details of the injury, etc.
The drive to Omak is a whole lotta nothing through a reservation. Single lane, slow speed, stuck behind people. Nothing to say at all. Oh, there was this one spot where everyone suddenly pulled over for some reason, people were running out of their car, and I was able to get ahead of 5 or more cars. That was cool. Otherwise unremarkable. Completely unremarkable.