We’ve been on the road for some long hours these past few days, and I haven’t had time for daily blog entries. But this will be a somewhat quieter day, up here in the Canadian Rockies, so I’ve got a little time to catch up.

We left Salt Lake City on Monday morning (May 22nd), heading north toward Boise. It’s interesting that when you think about cities and towns on the other side of the country, distances seem to get compressed. I suspect that people in Salt Lake think that Boston and New York are only a few miles apart; and I naively thought that it would take only a few hours to go from Salt Lake to Boise. But it was an all-day affair, with the last hour spent driving through sheets of rain. We checked into a hotel whose promised “restaurant” consisted of a bakery shop, but at least we got there in time to see the final episode of “24″. What a disappointment: how could Jack Bauer be silly enough to go off into a deserted warehouse at the end of the show, in his moment of victory, to take a phone call from his daughter who had sworn never to speak to him again? Didn’t he know that he would be kidnapped by masked Chinese assassins, and smuggled out of the country on a freighter whose name was “Shanghai”? Well, at least we know where next season’s first episode will begin…

Actually, we could have reached Boise more quickly if we had taken Interstate 84 out of Utah; but we took a detour up past Malad City (described by two of its teenagers, according to our Idaho guide book, as “There’s nothing to do in this town,” and “Malad sucks!”), past Pocatello, and stopped for lunch in the town of Blackfoot — primarily because it’s the home of the Idaho Potato Expo. We had been intrigued by a note in our guide-book claiming that the Expo contained a letter from the Governor of Idaho to former VP Dan Quayle, advising him that, like “potato,” Idaho should be spelled without a terminal “e.” Well, it was a bust: it was a tiny little place whose best feature was a large, badly-painted phony Idaho spud. So, forsaking potatos, we had a couple slices of pepperoni pizza at the local Mr. Pizza shop, and continued northward toward the next scenic attraction: the Craters of the Moon national monument.

The National Park Service offers the following description: “A sea of lava flows with scattered islands of cinder cones and sagebrush characterizes this “weird and scenic landscape” known as Craters of the Moon. Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve contains three young lava fields covering almost half a million acres.” Well, we didn’t inspect all half-million acres, but we did drive a seven-mile loop around the place, and stopped to see one of the taller lava cones. If you’re really interested in such things, here’s a web-cam of the local area.

Unfortunately, all of this left us in the middle of nowhere, on a small highway about 200 miles east of Boise. Had it been an Interstate, we could have covered the distance in about three hours; but there were several stretches of one-lane roads, with long delays for construction work that seems to be underway all over the state. We whizzed through several tiny towns with populations of a thousand or less — towns like Arco (the first town in the country to be powered by nuclear energy, in 1951), so small they don’t even show up on an enlarged Google Maps display — and finally rejoined Interstate 84, and survived an hour of torrential downpour before finally pulling into Boise.

On Tuesday morning, David insisted that we have a hearty breakfast at Goldy’s Breakfast Bistro before heading north to Sandpoint. What a great place! Enormous quantities of eggs, sausage, coffee, hash browns; and the place was jammed, even in the middle of the week (maybe there’s nothing else to do in Boise, but that may be a biased statement). Stuffed with food, we waddled back to the car and headed north again, along the Salmon River.

Salmon River is apparently known as the “The River of No Return,” but I’ll always think of it as “The River That Flows North.” In my humble opinion, rivers ought not to flow north. East, west, and south are fine; but it just confuses the heck out of me when I see a river flowing north. Along the way, the sky was a melancholy gray, but the fields and meadows were the lush green of an early spring; David remarked that it looked a lot like Scotland.

Somewhere along the way, we rounded a corner and saw a roadside stand that advetised, in large letters, “Cherry Cider!” David called for an immediate halt, and we hustled inside to buy some of the stuff — assuming, of course, that it was locally grown. Only later did we discover that it was bottled by Bowman Orchards, in Big Fork, Montana — just up the road from Polson, which we’ll be passing through in a couple of days, and which I’ve written about in other sections of my web site (see, for example, “The Polson Parade” and “Leaving Montana“.) David managed to guzzle down the entire bottle of liquid, but said it was like injecting pure sugar into his veins.

Along with the cherry cider, we also picked up a bottle of huckleberry lemonade (as yet untouched!) and a CD of songs by Buzz Goertzen, known to fans far and wide as “the Idaho Yodeler.” So we proceeded further north, toward Couer d’Alene and Sandpoint, listening to soulful versions of “Where did the yodelers go?” and “She tought [sic] me to yodel.” Hey, you just haven’t lived until you’ve zoomed up a winding mountain road, alongside a river flowing the wrong damn way, in a bright blue convertible (okay, okay, the top wasn’t down, but so what?), listening to the Idaho Yodeler warbeling away at full volume. But I do have to admit that I could have done without the yodeling version of “It’s A Small World, After All”; I thought I had left that behind in Disney World years ago.

We eventually pulled into Sandpoint about 6 PM, and gradually discovered an important guideline of modern, Internet-enabled traveling: be careful with the information you get from places like Travelocity. I had tracked down a hotel for the night, listed as a “mountain resort” with the three things I really cared about: Internet access, a restaurant, and a fitness/exercise center. The Selkirk Lodge, where we ended up (after driving nine miles up to the top of a mountain outside of Sandpoint) turned out to be a ski resort whose winter season had ended, but whose summer season had not yet begun. During this “limbo” period, there was only one restaurant — which closed at 5 PM. We had microwaved hot pockets for dinner, slunk into our respective rooms, and turned in early.

On Thursday morning, we grabbed a quick breakfast back in Sandpoint, and then headed north again, bound for Banff. We zoomed through Bonners Ferry, crossed the Canadian border (after convincing a bored customs official that we carried no guns, ammunition, or alcohol), and stopped in Cranbrook (which, contrary to what I had thought, is actually part of British Columbia, not Alberta) for lunch. Back in the car after lunch, we continued north, finally entered the Canadian National Park area that surrounds Banff, Jasper, and Lake Louise … and coasted into Banff around 6 PM. I wish I could write glowing testimonials to the beautiful scenery, but the truth is that it was gray and foggy much of the way, and raining the rest of the way. C’est la vie.

We’re staying at the Fairmont Banff Springs, a huge, sprawling stone castle that sits on the Bow River and looks out over a magnificent vista of Canadian peaks. While the service and amenities are excellent, I find it somewhat austere and cold: huge wide stone-walled halls with pictures of scowling Scotsmen, high ceilings, enormous reception areas and restaurants. It seems to be a mecca for tour groups and conventions: hordes of Japanese tourists float by from time to time, and slightly confused mobs of elderly tourists are herded from their buses to various staging areas. But the food is good, and there’s plenty to explore in the area; David has already gone off on a boat tour while I spent the better part of Thursday on an extended conference call.

More details tomorrow about Lake Louise, and then we’ll be leaving Saturday morning for Polson, Montana…