| Day 40 - Wednesday, September 28 - Washington | << Index |
| Anticipated: Play golf at Downriver Golf Course in Spokane, Washington. |
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| Click on the photos below to enlarge | ||
 Downriver Golf Course sign |
 Assistant Golf professional Brenda Hall |
 Golfing partners Baird Johnson and Marv Bishop (top) Tad Gropp, interested golfer in our trip |
 Scenes from the golf course |
 Scenery along the mountainous highway between Spokane, WA and Ontario, OR (Highway 95) |
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We spent last night at a Super 8 motel in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, about 35 miles east of Spokane. We left the motel at 7:30AM on I90 and arrived at Downriver Golf Course at 8:30AM in time for our 9:00 tee time. The golfers were getting off on time although there was a slight delay because of the frost. The sky was bright and clear with a mid-forty temperature as we teed off. The golf course was crowded, and every tee time was taken. We were quite surprised to see so many golfers considering it was a weekday in late September. Apparently the Washingtonians love their golf.
We were pleased to be paired up with Baird Johnson and Marv Bishop. They were very enjoyable to play with and they knew the golf course, which was helpful to us. The golf course was somewhat rolling and most of the fairways were quite tight with great Ponderosa Pines crowding the edges of the fairways. The greens were quite nice, but difficult to putt because of the subtle breaks (and some very extreme). The bright spot of the day was Pat’s 60-yard 9-iron shot on the 18th hole to a blind green. We all heard it clang into the pin, but had no idea what happened to the ball. Arriving at the green we discovered the ball in the hole for Pat’s second Birdie of the trip – very nice!! Jim shot a 91 (yardage = 5919) and Pat shot 101 (yardage = 5592). This was a very good score considering the women’s yardage is quite long. We would like to thank Brenda Hall, the assistant golf professional for her courtesy and hospitality. Also, thanks to Tad Gropp, a golfer we met after our round who took an interest in our golf odyssey.
After golf (1:00PM) we left immediately for our next destination. We had about 400 miles (8 hours) of desert, mountaneous roads to Ontario, Oregon. After golf tomorrow (Thursday) we will have another 400 miles to Ely, Nevada (7 hours of desert driving), and on Friday we will drive to Needles, California via Las Vegas on US95 (300+ miles, 6 hours). We will have no time to stop in Las Vegas. This stretch of 3-days is our longest 3-day drive as we are essentially driving from the northern to the southern reaches of the US. Today in Spokane was as far west as we will travel. As can be seen from the map of our trip, we are just touching the eastern boundaries of Washington, Oregon and California.
It was dark prior to our arrival at Ontario, and the mountainous 2-lane US95 was no fun to drive, however we did have a beautiful sunset over the mountain (see picture). Also, there was a bad wreck at the mountain pass, which held us up for 20 minutes. Needless to say we were glad to arrive at our motel after a 13-hour day.