Across ID and WA

Stuffed Beaver, Sand Point Museum, ID

Our story continues with a drive south through the Idaho Panhandle. We stopped in Bonner’s Ferry, Sand Point, Pend Oreille River, and viewed the Albeni Dam. Then we wound up in Deer Park, WA, just north of Spokane. Idaho is the fastest growing state by percent population expansion. Its population was 1.7M last year. It seemed to house all those former CA, UT, and WA residents whose states have gotten too crowded. Oregonians, on the other hand, just move to Bend. Just a reminder: California’s population is 39.75M, and all of Canada has 37M. Oregon has 4.15M. (If overcrowding breeds rudeness, why are the Japanese so polite?) One of the themes of our trip has been hanging out in beautiful vast empty places. Idaho qualifies. I would have liked to spend more time around Sand Point, but we had to cross ID and WA in four days to make it to a reserved campsite in Olympic National Park. So we’ll come back someday.

In Deer Park, WA I attended a quilt show. The Fat Quarter Ladies hold an annual display and competition. A fat quarter is a yardage term for a quarter yard of fabric. For $1 admission and some raffle tickets I was in among peers. There were about 25 ladies of a certain age and one bored guy in a corner on his smartphone. The quilts I liked best were the repaired ones. Someone took a musty, threadbare heirloom and added new patches to revive it. Quilting is not quite the communal activity it once was, but still overwhelming female. Smart, tough sewing machines obviate the need for tedious hand quilting. Even piecing, or putting the top together, is usually done by machine. But the ladies find ways to make it social: holiday parties, stitch ‘n’ bitch, and competitions. For instance, each quilter receives a bag of mixed fabric scraps and comes back the following month with what she did with them. Or each quilter produces a quilt on an assigned theme like “patriotism.” Or the quilters draw lots with flower names and each creates a potholder to represent the flower. I lost the raffle, which benefited the local ambulance service, but walked away with a cloth tube with drawstrings on either end, designed to hold plastic bags ready for re-use. At $1, a bargain. I overlooked the quilters’ dreadful politics (photos of them participating in the March for the Unborn — Oy) and tried to adjust my subculture-filter to Wide. For just an hour, I can practice nice. Longer than that: iffy.

Then we joined the flow on I-90, which laterally bisects Washington. A primitive stop in Ellensburg on the Yakima River left us with souvenir mosquito bites. Then we headed toward Puget Sound, overnighting with a tribe at Little Creek Casino in Shelton. Great buffet. Great taxidermy. Those are unrelated observations.

Whale at Little Creek Casino, WA

The stylish hallway at Little Creek. Note Bear at top.

From Shelton we headed north along the Hood Canal. We stopped for oysters at Hama Hama. JG is no friend of bivalves and preferred crab cakes. I liked looking out at the oyster farms, of which only floats and bits of rope are visible. What a great, green industry. Here’s the decor at the oyster place:

We overnighted in Sequim, pronounced Squim, famous for beautiful bays, dry weather in the rain shadow of the Olympics, and lavender.