We flew up to Post Falls Friday. We went by way of Portland on an Alaska Air Boeing MD-80. That’s the one with three seats on one side and two on the other. Since first class has two by two that makes you have to negotiate a little dog-leg with your luggage where the aisle moves from the middle to off to the side. Then we got on a Horizons (run by Alaska) Bombardier Q-400 which is a 74 passenger prop (I call it a puddle jumper) plane. That one makes for a rough ride. We went on to Spokane in that one.
The next day we went all the way to the Canadian border and visited Gardner cave, the third largest (or second—depends on who you talk to) cave in Washington. We got to go in about 500 feet. It used to belong to a moonshiner who would walk his customers a few hundred yards north of the cave to finish up the sale. Once when a federal agent tried to put him under arrest he laughed and said, “you can’t, we’re in Canada!” (The cave is right on the border!)
We also saw Boundary Dam which was the dam where they built the city run by the rock star Tom Petty in the movie “The Postman.” You might remember the line where the postman asks him, “Weren’t you famous?” What was really cool is we got a personal tour. It’s not like Hoover Dam. This dam is really out of the way so there aren’t a lot of tourists. we got to see a lot of it. We were walking down a tunnel and we started to walk on a grate. Raegan looked down and when she realized it was four stories down she jumped off the grate and wouldn’t walk on any kind of grate the rest of the day! I think this dam is way cooler than Hoover. It’s built like a piece of egg shell, so when you’re on the walkway below the dam it’s curving out above your head. It’s only eight feet thick at the top (thirty-five at the base) and looks flimsy, but the curve is very strong—like an egg shell! We had a great time and the grandkids loved it.
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