Tuesday, July 4th, 2023

Starting mileage: 6139, Distance travelled: 525

We got on the road with breakfast from Starbucks by 7:15am. Before long, we were passing Flathead Lake in the Flathead Indian Reservation. We saw a fence made out of bicycles but didn’t get a picture. The second photo of farmland represents what to us seems crazy. This narrow two-way road through Montana farmland has a 70 mph speed limit, despite having no shoulder and winding all over the place.

Somewhere near Paradise, MT the road began following the Clark Fork River winding through the valley all the way down to the I-90 junction. It turned out to be the Paradise to St. Regis Scenic Byway, we found out when we reached a truck stop in St. Regis.

Shortly after 9am (after the time change), we crossed into Idaho. We drove through the 4th of July Pass, ON the 4th of July, and captured a shot of the largest American flag ever…at Camping World, home of the enormous American flags.

As we approached the western border of Idaho, we drove the Lake Coeur d’Alene Scenic Byway past the beautiful lake and surrounding hills. Sadly, Susan missed the Washington state sign because she was desperately trying to catch up on the blog posts while we had the recently rare 5G cell service.

After stopping at a very sketchy truck stop to eat lunch, we started seeing what looked like tornadoes off in the distant field, despite crystal clear skies. After some googling on “dustnado” we realized they were likely dust devils and weren’t going to take our camper off to Oz. They were hard to capture on film, but if you look in the distance you can see the vertical dust spirals.

We started noticing the state route number signs in the shape of George Washington’s head once we crossed the border. Then we were very excited to enter George, Washington. We snapped a photo for Gargy, in honor of Susan’s dad.

We stopped at a pullout before crossing the Columbia River and saw some beautiful views up and down the River.

Brady snoozed for the last stretch before we arrived at David’s brother’s house in Bellevue, just east of Seattle by about 4:30pm. We were pleased to see how quickly the kids settled in and got along with cousin Ben, who they hadn’t seen went for years. They bounced on the trampoline, staging scenarios to film in short video clips, and hilarity ensued. We all went for a walk, exploring Jesse’s beautiful neighborhood and surrounding green spaces and ended the evening watching fireworks from a hill in the nearby botanical garden.