AN INCOMPLETE DIARY OF A ROAD TRIP...
...and you thot talking on cellphones or texting while driving is a bad thing!
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I hadn't been away from the Southern Oregon Coast in six years. But it was bound to happen. I'm talking about The Class Reunion, different this time around because I had to Travel over 300 miles to get there. For years, I lived in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and graduated high school there. Not this time around! I flew the coop and got out of there only to fly back into the coop six years later for my 40th class reunion. This post, then, documents photos I took on the Sly. For, you see, I shot photos while driving. I'm not proud of that, but I'd already postponed the trip by a day, and I had to make good use of my time. This was also an opportunity to get photos of Other Things Besides My Area Of The Coast. So I did what I did. But I kept the car "shiny side up and between the ditches".
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-First of all, let's hear it for I-5. It's a really great road in that it's mostly level and fairly straight. One hand on the wheel, the other holding the camera. Taken somewhere around 8am, the temperature inland wasn't that much warmer than on the coast. So things started out fairly well. That would later change...




Another shot from I-5, looking eastward. The Willamette Valley looks like one big flood plain, and it's easy to imagine the distant hills as islands in an earlier water-logged or glacial environment in which things were leveled out on a grand scale. We're about 150 miles south of Portland here...as you can tell, this is quite the agricultural area...


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To get to North Idaho from I-5, you Go to Portland and take a right turn, which sends ya up the Columbia River Gorge. It gets hotter the further east you go, and if it wasn't for the wind vanes on the hills, this part of the country would be uglier than it already is. This is Biggs Junction, which is about halfway between Coos Bay and Coeur d'Alene. "Desolate" doesn't begin to describe this place. This photo looks north toward the Washington side of the mighty Columbia...

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Crossing the Columbia River, and negotiating the traffic mess that is the Tri-Cities in Washington State, you can see the country doesn't change much in appearance, though the temperature had to be somewhere close to 100 degrees out here. Please, car, don't break down now! If you've ever envisioned yourself going absolutely nowhere, this is what it looks like when you get there...


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It was getting hot and late and I put the camera aside and concentrated on driving hard the last three hours of the trip, which grew volcanic-hot because I had no Freon in the air-conditioning. I just wanted to Get There. I met up with Interstate 90, blasted through Spokane and arrived in Coeur d'Alene after over 11 hours on the road. So how morbid was this road trip? Look at where I stayed! But the room had a great air conditioner! Not bad for a cheap motel. Best of all, I Survived The Bates Motel. I heard no loud screams as the shower water was running, and needed no bandages. All in all, things turned out much better than I thot they would.

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I arrived in Coeur d'Alene on Wednesday night, which gave me all day Thursday to putt around town, seeing things, driving around town, looking at all of the changes (see "A Tale Of Two Coeur d'Alenes", a couple posts below this one), but this lake photo was taken Wednesday night after I checked into the Bates...I headed for the one place in town I wanted to go...Coeur d'Alene City Park...and I knew the view that I wanted to see, and this was it...
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Sitting on a park bench, behind the sea wall, once again I was looking out over Lake Coeur d'Alene on a warm Summer evening...Mica Peak in the distance, looming in the west as the temps Finally Cooled Down. I spent a lot of time here in younger years. I always wondered how I'd feel, coming back after being away for so long. And you know, it felt good. I'm reminded of a quote which singer Loreena McKennitt included in her latest CD, "The Wheat That Shakes The Barley"...
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"Every Once In A While, there is a pull to return to one's roots or beginnings, with the perspective of time and experience, to feel the familiar things you once loved, and love still." And although the area has grown tremendously over the years, everything I sought was right where it was supposed to be.

A TALE OF TWO COEUR D'ALENES...
...it was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
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If by "the worst of times", one is referring to the economy, he/she's probably correct. But within that climate of economic paranoia, towns keep growing, inventors keep inventing, businesses keep popping up everywhere, and life goes on, which indeed it has in my old home town of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Now before I get started here, I'm no supply-side economic theorist; I approach it from the impressions it makes upon me and what I come away from it all thinking. My old home town's been growing, growing, growing. I may not know which businesses are in what building, but there's been a lot of building going on. So, that said, let's take the plunge...
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I don't know if downtown CDA's premier coffee shop is still called "Java On Sherman", but for old times' sake, I got my day started here this morning. Until I moved away 6 years ago, I was in here at least 4 days a week, breathing in coffee fumes as my life depended on it, which it probably did. This is what I miss most about the Coos Bay, Oregon area I live in now. There are no coffee shops!
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However, everything changes. Here inside "The Java Place", the chair I used to sit in is gone, replaced by counters and other implements of the coffee trade. Good coffee shops are great places for one to immerse himself in public. In my case, I overheard two guys talking business, and felt glad that I didn't have to do that anymore.
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MMM..along with coffee, a big raspberry muffin...who cares what kind of muffin it is as long as there's plenty of overhang and a double-dose of sugar on top. It's nice to know some things don't change; years ago when I was last here the muffins were just as huge as this one. Consuming that muffin helped me to carbo-load for the day ahead...I gained five pounds just Looking at that muffin!

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Fortified at last on my muffin diet, I hit the streets. At photo left, here's a big landmark that wasn't there several years ago before I left. Taken from in front of the "Zip Stop" gas mart that's managed to survive over the years. The only bummer-factor here is, that Tall Building is but one of those blocking the view of Lake Coeur d'Alene, which is back there somewhere...

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Strange creatures have been frozen forever in suspended animation on various street corners downtown; I believe this is a "bum" steer? It's nice, I suppose, to run across something unusual like this. Although, there's a paradox here; Coeur d'Alene has some of the most stringent business sign laws in the world, but artists can put artificial animals of most any size most anywhere.
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This is Sherman Avenue between 3rd and 4th; what you see here is the historic Clark's Jewelry Street clock; that's where it was when I used to win radio contests long ago, with the winning price being a Caravelle watch, which I won and gave to my Mom. A couple times a week I'd go pick up 5 records which the Radio Station sent to Clark's. Fun times from waay back...
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There are several businesses inside this building, which is the Old Coeur d'Alene Fire Department structure. On the east side of the building, you can see the big arched structures that fire trucks used to come out of and park themselves back in. It's nice when these grand old buildings are resuscitated by Positive Economics. Also, the old IOOF building nearby has been converted into a "Great Floors" franchise.
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Coeur d'Alene seems to have been inundated by strange metal animals appearing all over the place. This one's in front of a bank. There's another moose similar to this one, who's parked himself near where the Seaplanes take off. Every city must have it's own thing; in the Coos Bay/North Bend area, fire hydrants have been painted every imaginable color and one day I'll do a post on those.
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Coeur d'Alene's downtown is changing very rapidly, and the growth
of the trees you see here make shopping at downtown businesses seem like a nature walk. Way back in the summer of '85, the city street department ripped up all the pavement you see here, and walking on Sherman back then became very much like hiking through the wilderness...
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In the northwest portion of town, a big development has opened up, featuring shops, services, escrow houses, cinemas and apartment houses all over the place. In fact, it's frightening in a way, how people are stacked into boxes that are made of ticky-tacky (quote from an old Pete Seeger song there), but undeniably the times they are a-changin' in the Coeur d'Alene area.
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But it's a tale of two Coeur d'Alenes. When I got to my motel a couple of days ago, the owner and I were talking about this area. He graduated in 1968 from Coeur d'Alene High, and he said that (the proverbial 'they') have taken "all the real jobs out of Coeur d'Alene". Meaning, of course, mining, logging, and other core industries. And it's true; those businesses are long gone. One of the "Coeur d'Alenes" is ritzy, appealing, designed to fill every rich tourist's dream, while the "other" Coeur d'Alene, which begins at 8th and Sherman and proceeds east, looks just like it did in the 1950's.
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The people in the neighborhoods which surround the East End of Sherman are all working-class people, struggling every day to make ends meet; some with dingy homes that have fallen into disrepair, trying to grind out the American Dream, at service jobs, gas stations, grocery stores, manufacturing plants, driving local taxi-cabs, or reporting to work at 6am to slap them Sausage-Egg McMuffins together, trying to stay on the good side of ruthless bosses. Chances are those blue-collar workers won't be shopping at expensive downtown stores; they'll be buying used clothing at Goodwill or St. Vinnies, and trying to make their money go as far as possible by clipping coupons and hoping they have enough gas in the tank to get to Wal-Mart once in a while.
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This post was written in my motel room at The Bates Motel, and remarkably, no one has stabbed me in the shower yet. I'm getting this room for $32 a night. It's a Cheap motel room. On the East End of Sherman Avenue, of course.

I DECIDED TO ANSWER THE PHONE...
...guess I won't be making that mistake again for a while...
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RRRRRRING!!! I could tell from the silence when I first picked up the receiver that it was some phone-solicitation thing. Usually I hang up instantly, but in this case I actually said "hello" a couple of times before the lady on the other end began to speak. She told me that as a customer of (the bank I bank with), that some really great new insurance coverage was available to me, at a fantastic rate. Not really absorbing what she was saying, I could tell she had up-shifted to "hard-sell" gear. Vrooom! She was telling me how it was risk-free, that it was reasonably priced, and would be oh, so convenient. Then she said her boss would come on the line and tell me again what I'd already heard, and sure enough, another lady (her boss) came on and began repeating everything; she was hurling facts, figures and advice into my ear at twice the clip of the previous lady. I must admit I was getting heavily "snowed" here; indeed, a piece of my mind was thinking, "why haven't I hung up by now?" And she almost had me, until I asked her, "is this health insurance or what?" and she said, "oh no, these are DEATH benefits payable to your beneficiary". And she's trying to keep me in a Good mood?
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I thought about that for a moment...'I don't HAVE any beneficiaries'. But I had to snap back to attention, because after all, the lady wasn't thru with her speel...as she kept yakking away, trying to get me to sign up, she was telling me how Convenient it all was, that she could send me a form, allowing me time to decide if I wanted in when all of a sudden, The Caveat appeared: She said I would have two weeks to decide if I wanted this insurance or not, and was telling me how risk-free the whole thing was. So I asked her, "say I don't send in the form after a couple of weeks, would I start getting billed?" And she answered "yes". I then asked her, "how can you tell me this thing is risk-free if you charge me if I forget to send in the form?" I know myself. I'm the baddest procrastinator EVER. And all of a sudden, she melted, just like the Wicked Witch in "The Wizard Of Oz". I could feel it over the phone lines. She ran out of gab, she ran out of answers, the train jumped the tracks and sailed over the cliff. She gave me another '800' number I could call if I wanted to buy the insurance she'd initially tried to sell me, after which she bailed. She was probably glad to get rid of me, the solicitee.
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Life is supposedly a circle. Everything comes back. My Karma ran over your Dogma. Et Cetera. A while back I got a letter from my auto insurance company, advising me to call them regarding payment. That immediately brought up a red flag of sorts..."wait a minute, how can I owe these guys money when I'm on Automatic Bill-Pay?" And with that, I tacked the letter up on the fridge and forgot about it for a while. Told you I'm a Procrastinator! Time went by, and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made; something along the lines of, "wait a minute...maybe they Owe ME money? Could it be?" Yes, it could. I locked my keys in my car a few months ago, and it turned out "The Gecko" was trying to send me a reimbursement check! Let's just say Lock and Key personnel come cheap. So I was due funds. Call made; money being sent. I like that. Now, I figure if I can receive more reimbursement mail than I do monetary sinkholes via the telephone, then I should survive this life quite well.
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AN OLYMPIC MOMENT OF GREATNESS: "Our Jess", the English call her. That's Jessica Ennis, a young lady who's been under the greatest of pressures ever. Simply put, she was England's Big Hope for a Gold Medal in the women's heptathalon event. If you look at a map of the British Isles, you'll see they're not really very big. If you're famous, where do you go to hide? After Paul McCartney dropped out of sight after the Beatles broke up, he was tracked down by the press, hiding out at a farm in Scotland with his wife and kids. I don't think anyone can hide anywhere in Britain. Anyway, the heptathalon is one of those multiple events where contestants have to do multiple things, ending with a fairly long running event. Jessica started out with the rest of the field, and she took the lead early. She didn't need to win the race, because her point total was so far above everyone else's. All she had to do was coast to the finish line. Sure enough, two of her competitors passed her with about half a lap to go, and Jess was in 3rd place, still a sure bet to win the heptathalon. What a surprise it was, then, to see her go around the two ladies in front of her and kick it in to the finish line. True Greatness All The Way. That was purely amazing and I'll never forget it.
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FORTY YEARS AND NINETY DEGREES: I've lived on the Oregon Coast for going on six years now. I can count on one hand how many days the temperature has been above 90 degrees since I've been here. It usually never gets above 75 degrees. In my case, that's about to change over the next several days. You see, I'm heading off to my 40th High School Class Reunion. I'll be heading to the Altered State Of Idaho, which is very landlocked and oftentimes can get very hot in the summer. And, if I don't totally vaporize, I'll be taking tons of photos along the way in addition to providing running commentary in my own pseudo-tactful way. IMPORTANT UPDATE: The Reunion was a GAS! It's amazing, that as the years pass, that we all seem to relate better with each other, and although I wasn't sure how things would turn out, it's worth it, going back, for you find that in many ways, those you are reuniting with are part of You. I'm really glad I went, so if you're wondering whether to go to your reunion or not, I'd say "GO". You won't be sorry. (This updated portion written August 13th, 2012.)

One thing in my favor is that Gas Prices are lower these days, even here on the coast. A gallon is "only" $3.60 a gallon. That's how the business works; the prices get jacked up, then come down to a level above where the prices were before the Drastic Increase. So we're still getting shafted. (Well, I can't very well use the term, "screwed"; this is a family blog after all...)

TRYING TO PACE MYSELF...
...the saga of Baseball, Olympiads and Adipose Tissue...
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This is that really strange time when there's just Too Much To Watch if you like Sports. I'm not one of those junkie-type-fans who call sports shows and cuss everyone out, but right now, we're in the midst of baseball season and The Seattle Mariners are actually beginning to look like a baseball team. Ever since Ichiro left the building a week ago, the M's are Pitching! Hitting! And Scoring! And they've been wining against lousy teams, but also against Better teams. In this age of Low Expectations, I want the Mariners to achieve the .500 mark by season's end. To win as many as they lose. That's all I ask...
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Achieving that .500 record is going to take Lots Of Time, but there is hope, and for once, after game's end, The M's don't look like they're headed for the Death Chamber. Right now the M's are on pace for a win total in the upper '60s. So we'll see. They're 49-57 right now. There's 56 games left in this season. They would need to win 32 of those games to get to an 81-81 record, and the prospects are dim. But for the moment, the M's have been looking pretty good. Of course the logic is, "this is a rebuilding year", and in that light, the M's are succeeding, because they're better this year than last. They couldn't have gotten much worse.
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But, once again, my baseball-watching-time (and other-program-watching-time) is being seriously encroached on by The Olympics, the 2012 version, based in Merrie Olde London, England. I absolutely love every facet of The Olympics. I'm there for Water Polo, Gymnastics, Swimming and even WhiteWater Rapids (which was the last thing I expected to see at an Olympiad in Great Britain!). But it's there, courtesy of some construction wizards who engineered the course which actually does a fairly good job of mimicking a mountain stream, and yes, those who fashioned the Olympic Man-Made Artificial Water Rapids remembered to use plenty of Blue Paint.
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Looking back thru older posts, I've distorted the subject of the Olympics time and time again, and so, this post continues that tradition. I like what Google does, big corporation that it is, customizing their header for whatever's going on, and here they picture a field hockey player going for the gold.

For me, the Olympics are like a sort-of visual Salad Bar...so many different things to sample. So far I've seen those cute little girls all in tears over meltdowns in Gymnastics (as befell the Russian women's team), I've seen Michael Phelps win his record 19th swimming medal; he's the most decorated Olympian Ever, and he still has 3 races left in this Olympiad. I've been watching the Mens' Breaststroke, and that's gotta be one of the most difficult ways to move through water with any speed at all, let alone finesse. And in women's gymnastics I've seen little Jorden Weiber's amazing comeback tonight, after she lost in competition earlier this week. Tonight she has a gold medal.
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Watching the Olympics reminds me of things I used to do, for I used to swim The Mile, and I used to run The Marathon. At my own pace, of course. What, you think I had anywhere near Olympic Talent? No, but I have eleven Marathon Finisher Medals and I'm proud of them. And maybe I'll one day get back in the Pool, even if those swimming in the lane next to me would probably mistake me for a Whale. Thar She Blows!!! One thing in my favor (favour, if you're British): Fat (Adipose)Tissue Floats Very Well. In the meantime, I can live vicariously through these Olympians I'm watching, in that "I've done some of that". I can relate a little bit. I know what it's like to push and push until it hurts. Although these days, it takes less pushing to hurt than it used to.
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Another instance of an Artificial World created in these London Olympics is in the Beach Volleyball event. I'm fairly sure that Great Britain has beaches. That country has quite a few miles of shoreline; surely, there's gotta be a friendly beach in the (relative) neighborhood that one can stake a Volleyball net into, but, nooo, tons of Beach Sand have been brought inside and that's where the games are played. But I'm wondering what the difference is, really, between Beach and Regular Volleyball...couldn't a Beach Volleyballer also play on a court? Maybe those skills don't transfer, one to another. There are only two people on a beach volleyball team, after all. From what I can see, the main difference is, the Beach Volleyballers' uniforms are a LOT skimpier. In short, they wear less clothes during the game than I do when I drag myself to bed.
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It's now just past two a.m., and I've just seen Alison Schmidt tally an Olympic Record in the Womens' 200m Freestyle...I saw this one "Live", there being eight hours' difference between me and London. Let's hope I get to bed sometime soon...