Today we continued our trip toward the west. We left Woodland RV Park in Libby, MT, and headed west on US-2. We passed Kootenai Falls and passed through Troy before crossing the border into Idaho.
There was pretty good river, lake, forest and mountain scenery along the road in Idaho as we descended out of the Rocky Mountains towards the plains of eastern Washington. We did not stop in Idaho because about the only real town we passed through was Sandpoint, home of disgraced policemen from other states and home-grown Nazis from the local ‘hood.
We kept going right across the panhandle of Idaho until we eventually passed over the Pend Oreille River and the border into Washington at the town of Newport. This is at least the fifth Newport we have been in during the last two years: Newport, CA; Newport, OR; Newport, Maine; Newport News, VA and Newport, WA. As to the pronunciation of Pend Oreille, Peggy guessed it was Pend-Oh-Really? and I guessed Pend-O’Reilly but we ultimately learned that because these words come from a bizarre and arcane dead language, they are pronounced Pon-Duh-rey. Go figure.
Ten miles west of Newport we pulled into the Little Diamond RV Park and Campground near, but not on, Diamond Lake. They have a pond here which I suppose they call Little Diamond Lake but it really is not a lake. The campground does not have any camping spots near the pond but it does have a pool, a hot tub, electrical and water hookups and no wi-fi except at a building near the pond called the family lounge. Roads are gravel but it is very quiet. This is the first time in quite a while where we could not hear train horns blasting out two longs, a short and a long at each grade crossing. The best part about this campground is that it is part of the Thousand Trails system and we get to stay here for up to 21 days without charge except if we want honey wagon service during our stay. I believe I will go ahead and pay the $25 it costs to have a guy come to our site and empty our holding tanks instead of breaking down our blocks and chocks and utility connections and using the local dump station. It gives me an opportunity to run my sewer jokes by the honey wagon operator – Our poop is his bread and butter, it is a shitty job, we got a lot of shit to talk about, etc., etc.
We had some folks pull into one of the two adjacent empty sites late in the day. The old guy of the couple promptly flooded his and our site with water he left running outside his motor home. The wife came over and apologized for running water through our site and then they left to go play games at the family center with other bored campers. Not too long after they left, Peggy noticed they were again flooding the sites so I turned off the water to their RV at the source. When they returned from the evening’s entertainment, I told the old couple that they have some form of leak and may want to investigate it before their nice motor home is cascading water out the front door while they are tied up in a hot Yahtzee game.
We got a few pictures during the drive today. You can see some of them if you click here