Winding down...

Next time I come to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, I will stay at the Flamingo Motel.

Frankly, I do not have any immediate plans though. I could easily love the Northwest, I think...(I don’t know...I’d have to try a whole winter before saying for sure...)but I cannot think of any logical reason I’ll be back soon. Still, the Flamingo Motel it would be. I almost booked it for tonight’s pre-flight-home stay. Excellently reviewed, refurbished 50s motor lodge in the heart of downtown, with great walk-to-dinner potential. But I was thinking we’d barely have time to do more than eat and sleep, so I stuck with the known quantity, and we’re here at the Holiday Inn Express. And a very nice HIE it is--the “guest services manager” is a Weimeraner named Dodger, and Jeff and I actually got 20 minutes in on exercise equipment for the only time this trip. But still...you can’t beat local color, unless it’s horrible, and the Flamingo looks good.

Deploying all my electronic oracles (iPhone Yelp App, Googlemaps,) I found us a cute bistro where we could get a light dinner, as I am still trying to digest the past week of food with limited success. (Nothing wrong with the food, mind, it’s me and travel.) Then, with the drizzle abating somewhat, we took a drive along the Coeur d’Alene lakefront, and that was a good move.

There’s almost nothing as useless as seeing nothing of a new town but the Holiday Inn Express just off highway exit 11, and I had no clue, really, what C d’A was like at all. It’s quite interesting, but barely urban. There’s lake, then an intriguing architectural assortment of rich-people houses, then a couple streets of classic Northwest mining town, then batches of smaller bungalows, and then the usual sprawl of shopping, services, and hotels for people who are not brave enough to book the Flamingo the first time.

As for a second time...hmm. I have been thinking of this trip as evaluative as well as diversionary. How would Jeff do? Will I ever choose anything but car travel again? Tentative answer: Not without lots of careful thought. Even the duration--a week--seems to contribute to his level of tiredness and functional downshifts, but we’ve managed well enough.

I’d say the trickiest part was lurching through five Empire Builder cars for each of the four times we took meals in the dining car. It got so that every time the train stopped at a station--if we were even close to a mealtime, we’d try to cover at least half the ground with the train not moving. Jeff is slow and not well balanced.

Still, he remains generally remarkably cooperative and ready to go with the program even when he has no idea what the program is. At about the border between Montana and Idaho, as we headed west from Whitefish, Jeff leaned forward a bit from the backseat of the rented Chevy Traverse and said “Are we on Amtrak?” It’s moments like that that make me realize just how gracefully he manages utter cluelessness.

In theory we will be home tomorrow night. Delta has changed the departure time of our connecting flight in Minneapolis twice since I booked it in January, each time narrowing our layover. According to our current itinerary, there are 34 minutes between our first and second flights, and the first has a 50% on-time rating. But Expedia says Delta says that is acceptable. I will appraise them of our medical situation--inability to hustle--when we check in to our first flight, to put Delta on notice that if they don’t hold the second gate open for us long enough they’re going to be sending us home on Thursday.