The Past Five Days in a Nutshell

We were on our way to Bainbridge Island, Washington...left Lake Mary about 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning (the 30th) and headed to Fargo, North Dakota.

We worked all afternoon blending up our yummy smoothies at a high school wrestling event called Rumble on the Red in Fargo.  The "Red" is the Red River which runs through Fargo.  That river can be just brutal but that's a whole other story.  In any case, the lines for smoothies were non-stop all day.  I'm not kidding. Non-stop.  We had two awesome workers and between the four of us we could hardly keep up.   So we were really tired when we closed.  But we had places to go and people to see so we trucked on down the road in a westerly direction and ended up in Dickinson, ND, a distance of 283 miles (I just looked it up on ask.com).  I think it took about four hours...give or take...slept like a log.

Crazy Mountains in Montana

Thursday morning (New Year's Eve day) we headed out about 7 a.m. thinking that if we could make it to Spokane, Washington, we'd have a fairly short day on Friday.  Just past Big Timber we came to the Crazy Mountains.  They're the first mountains going west through Montana and quite beautiful.  The tallest peak is about 11,000 feet.  There are several theories about how they were blessed with the name Crazy but none of them all that interesting.  Shot this photo through the car windshield which, as many of you know, is pretty normal for me...if we stopped every time I wanted to take a picture we'd never reach our destinations!  I just keep fingers crossed that a couple of them will be worth keeping.

 Approaching Snoqualmie Pass in Washington's Cascade Mountains.

The roads were clear and for the end of December that's really saying something.  There was hardly any snow at all in Montana as you can see from the Crazy Mountain photo.   Started snowing lightly as we were approaching Idaho, though, and got a little dicey about 30 miles from Coeur D'Alene.  The weather report included a winter storm warning for that part of the country and at that point Jack suggested that we drive as far west as we could before stopping....anything to beat the impending storm.   We finally called it a day when we reached Moses Lake, Washington.

Moses Lake, WA is 776 miles from Dickinson, ND (ask.com, again).  A long day.  We checked into the hotel at 8:50 p.m., turned on CNN and watched the New Year arrive in New York City, said, "Happy New Year" to each other and crashed.

Up and at 'em about 8 a.m. on Friday.  The only other mountain pass that we had to cross is Snoqualmie Pass which is a couple of hours west of Moses Lake.  It was snowing, of course.  29 degrees F.  45 mph speed limit.  Remind me, again, why we left home???

Long story short...we made it to my sister's house in Mt. Vernon...have spent four fun days visiting and tomorrow about noon we'll take the Edmunds ferry across to Kingston and then it's about a 20 minute drive to Winslow on Bainbridge Island.  I'm really looking forward to that, too.

Happy New Year, my friends.  Stay tuned...