Spokane to Ontario, Oregon

Today's weather just sucked.  Clouds in the trees, the road in the clouds in places, windy, wet, and cold.  Tomorrow night Spanish Fork is forecast to go into the 20's so all the drugs (prescription), Covid tests, and contact lenses have to come in so they don't freeze.  It makes me irritable to haul all of these things into the hotel, and then have to haul them back out.

I have had a major packing fail, my Clinique moisturizer and both our deoderants are in the cabinet where they always live, and not in the blue bag.  It's aggravating, I did so well on not forgetting stuff until I did.  Good thing it's cold, no one is sweating.

We are at the Holiday Inn Express.  It's not the worst place we've been.  The pros are, big room, lots of horizontal space for spreading out our multitudinous items.  Bathroom is large.  I do hate the shower head.  There is no good setting for the water flow, the shower curtain is not wide enough, so the floor is wet.  They're using a water softener; it's tough to feel really clean, softened water has a slimy feel.  The bathroom floor is not clean, our flip flops stick a little bit when we walk in there.  This hotel also charges the refundable $250 "deposit" in case you smoke in the room.  We don't smoke, but house keeping makes the call.  Once you're gone, good luck disputing that charge.  It's just aggravating.  We're on the freeway side of the hotel, I think if there is a next time I would request the other side of the building.  

We did better getting through Kenniwick, but we still messed up on an exit.  GPS sorted us out as soon as we realized we were not where we wanted to be.  Today's key learning was look at the GPS map prior to getting there, and know all of the places where one can go off track and don't do that.  We did have improvement today, I think we've run out of exits to miss.

Here are a couple of photos from today.  Photography was difficult due to the water on the windshield, and the phone camera's insistence on focusing on that, instead of outside.

Oil change and caffeine, everything you need, nothing you don't.

Snow in the area of Deadman's Pass.  It went away as we lost elevation.

Day one out of four is done, three more to go. 

Update to post:  We would not go back.  Even though I thought we were on the freeway side of the hotel, we weren't.  The truckers' Jake brakes woke us up a lot all through the night.  There was a lot of road noise.  Ontario is a grim little enclave, deep in the red part of Oregon.  We just did not like being there.