July 4 Green River, UT

Three days have passed since our last posting.  Today the heat forced us to quit at a reasonable hour, so there is time to write a few lines.

No shortage of snow and switchbacks on WA 20

Our trip through the Cascades on WA 20 was one of the best segments of this tour.  This road winds and climbs along the Skagit river for miles.  Beautiful views pass before you augmented with many well placed turnouts.  Not much traffic here, just the occasional RV.  Wonderful.

I enjoyed seeing the power plant at Newhalem.  This hydro plant was built next to the Skagit and fueled with a man-made tunnel providing pressurized water from miles upstream.  What's amazing is the tunnel was built in 1924 --- after years of haggling to obtain rights and money (mostly from the government) to build it.   More dams were added into the 60's.  We took a short hike to see one - the Gorge Dam.  This dam provided many engineering challenges and feeds the intakes for the Newhalem powerplant.  Great quote on one sign:  "A dam draws a line across a river.  The line between development and preservation is much more difficult to draw."  Washington used to not have a river it didn't plan on damming.  That has changed and some dams have been removed to help the Salmon and other impacted causes. 

We continued our trek up the Skagit, enjoying countless waterfalls crashing hundreds of feet into gorges.  No wonder these are called the Cascades.  After miles of climbs we ended up with very cold weather and icy snowdrifts along the shoulder. 

Healey poses in front of Grand Coulee Dam

Heading down, down down toward the east put us by the famous Grand Coulee dam on the Columbia.  We got there just in time to take a few pictures.  It is in incredible structure, and all the spillways were flowing vigorously.  Rainfall is well above normal here this year.  

We pushed on a bit further to Spokane, finding a comfortable La Quinta on the east side of town.

Grand Coulee is loud and lovely, just like Nance

Wednesday's travel was more mundane, we planned on sticking to interstates.  We needed to put a dent in the 1400 miles that remained between us and home.  We took I-90 east toward Missoula and Butte.  On the way, we did check out the Montana Car Museum in Deer Lodge, MT.  It was a very diverse collection, with about 120 cars from brass to muscle.  The car descriptions were well placed and excellent.  We learned this museum occupied the same buildings as former Towe collection.  The Towe museum was attached by the IRS and now resides in Sacramento.

This '50 Hudson, one of many in this museum

We headed south on I-15 from Butte, and planned to stay somewhere in Idaho.  This section of I-15 proved to be one of the most remote interstates I have ever seen.  It was easy to go a hundred miles without seeing a single gas station, motel, or cell phone tower.  It was very windy and the Healey was hard to handle.  For the first time on the trip, I felt a bit uncomfortable driving a 60 year old car -- a breakdown here would probably end up a sleep in:  surrounded by bears, antelope, and serial killers. The Healey did not pick up on these fears and kept humming along.  After a full 500 mile day we rolled into lovely Idaho Falls.  We had a great meal at the Sandpiper on the Snake River near the Idaho Falls and crashed for the evening.

July 4 was going to be a tough day for us.  From Idaho Falls South we would have endure the Salt Lake City complex of congestion.  And, it was rather warm, probably in the low 90's anyway.  We motored on, stopping often for water, ice, and snacks.  The traffic was mild due to the holiday.  But I-15 has lots of major reconstruction going on in south Salt Lake City and Provo.  We kept moving, but the lanes were full, narrow and often bumpy.  We were finally relieved to turn southeast on US 6 through the mountains east of Salt Lake City.  This climb to over 6000 ft did cool us off a bit. Smoke from several visible western slope fires even blocked the sun at times. In spite of many roads closed for fire, traffic was very light on this route and we sped onward to Green River.  As we descended into the river valley, it got rather warm.  We we were ready to quit after driving only 400 miles.  We stayed at the very comfortable and well maintained River Terrace Inn, right on the Green river.  We enjoyed the town's generous fireworks production from the hotel.

Tomorrow:  with good luck and a little time, Albuquerque!