I said yesterday that we found Spokane surprisingly weird. Also that the chef last night at our hotel’s Dona Margarita , a Spokane native, agreed that it was a bit weird, and said it was paranoid and had an inferiority complex.  Today, I would add one more thing. I think that Spokane is less than the sum of its parts.

Today, we visted its arboretum, its main park, and its downtown river park (home of a series of waterfalls on the Spokane River), each of which would be welcome in any city.  We visited Bing Crosby’s boyhood home, now on the campus of Gonzaga University. We looked at neighborhoods of attractive homes built more than 100 years ago, include some which are very elegant.

We saw the sculpture of energetic runners downtown.

We had breakfast at First Street Coffee, ultra modern, very large, right downtown, with maany ways to enjoy  coffee, and a limited selection of home baked pastries.

The shop had an interesti g sign posted on its door.

But the city is filled with people who appear to be homeless, and buildings poorly maintained. It just appears……well, weird.

Perhaps we should just laugh at it.

Leaving Spokane, the scenery is pleasant and before you know it, you are in Idaho, and a neighborhood that seems pretty uninteresting. But as you go north, there are large lakes, and pretty soon you are in the clearly prosperous resort city of Sandpoint.

We had a delicious lunch at Bixby’s (I had a bowl with pulled bbq chicken, corn, tomatoes, couscous, and something else), but passed a number of troubling signs, including

And after we headed east from Sandpoint, we saw

as well as

and more.

After we entered Montana, the scenery improved. Hills, mountains, lakes. And then we were at the Kalispell Hampton Inn, and had a delicious dinner at its neighbor, the very highly rated Himolayan Kitchen, where the four of us had tanduri chicken, samosa chat, vegetable korma, saag aloo, and garlic naan.

Tomorrow we go to Glacier National Park.