Who else played the game, Oregon Trail, when they were in school?  If you didn't, let me give you a brief explanation.  First of all, you put the floppy disk in the computer.  And by floppy, I quite literally mean flexible.  Do you remember those?  Okay, so you put the disk in, and the game starts.  You and your crew of peeps have to get from one end of the Oregon Trail to the other, without dying.  You must find food, avoid sickness, barter for things you need, ford rivers, and hunt.  Buffalo, preferably.  They give you the most meat.  Sometimes, you had to sacrifice your friends to avoid snakes.  But they understood, because on their game, you'd just drowned swimming across the river.  It was a good time.

Well, Oregon Trail may seem COMPLETELY irrelevant to our travels across the northwest... but it isn't.  According to my very informative road trip compadre, Oregon Trail ended in the Dalles of Oregon.  I didn't know that... because I never got to the end.  But that's beside the point.  Yesterday, we got up relatively early, and were packed and on the road before 8:30 for our 5ish hour drive from Portland to Spokane.

The drive took us through the mountains of Oregon (which, PS, were all snow covered and beautiful!), and then into the Dalles, which is an area where the mountains melt away into sloping fields (resembling Alpine Meadows, which I love) and a giant beautiful Columbia River floodplain.  Apparently, the Dalles can be quite the tricky area to drive, and between the snow and wind, it regularly becomes impassable.  Luckily, we had no problems.  I'm not sure our bright red Chevy Cobalt rental car can handle a whole lot of winter weather...

Our drive to Spokane was relatively uneventful.  We stopped for gas, and it turned out to be full service... and we couldn't figure out if Oregon is a mandatory full service station state, or if he was just there and we needed to tip, but we had no cash (Dad, are you reading this?), and he walked away too fast for us to give him one anyway...

Then we stopped at Walmart to get shampoo, and ended up getting some salami, cheese, bread, and apples for lunch (and a giant tin of popcorn.... impulse buy).  That is definitely my favorite car lunch ever.

We got to Spokane in early afternoon, checked into our hotel, and then headed down to the river for a walk.  We ended up walking along the river, and into down town for a while.  We stopped to get some hot chocolate, I oogled at an $899 copper mixer in Williams Sonoma (no, I would never ever spend that much money on a mixer, but it's still beautiful!), and we strolled back across the river to the car.  Keli had an interview dinner last night, so I finished my book (The Help, it was excellent, I highly recommend it), ate pizza, and watched football.  Our internet was having some issues, so I didn't do any productive online perusing.