The Spokane Adventure: The Mountains Ain't West No More
Yesterday was another long day, but nothing like the ones before. We saw a lot of apartments, eliminated most of them from contention (either because they're awesome but don't allow Ducks or because we don't like being raped or because we don't want all our stuff to burn up in a meth lab explosion), found the most awesome apartment ever, found out it probably had a really crappy shower, and spent a few hours convincing ourselves of reasons as to how a crappy shower might not matter.
I'm starting to learn my way around Spokane. It's actually a pretty hard city to navigate at first. My biggest problem is that my internal compass is calibrated through subconscious visual cues of the mountains. In Colorado, where I've spent almost my entire life, the mountains are West. My brain automatically, sometimes without me even knowing it, keeps track of the mountains and therefore West.
Here, though, the only side without mountains is West. At first I was consciously trying to keep my directions straight with the map in my head, but it kept swiveling around and pointing in exactly the wrong direction. Now that I have a better idea of the actual layout and am not depending on a month old remembered Google map, I can sort of get around Spokane without constantly feeling like I'm going the wrong way.
How? By getting lost. A lot. I still contend that getting lost is the best way to learn a new city. Through this same process, I've also come up with a hypothesis on apartment location desirability. Being close to downtown is nice, but not necessary. Being close to I-90 seems very necessary. Division acts as the other main thoroughfare and is a TOTAL MESS most of the time. We looked at a few apartments out at the north end of Division and I postulate that it would add a half hour onto a commute to anywhere that isn't also on the north end of Division. However, the same amount of distance out from downtown along I-90 only adds about 5-10 minutes. So Spokane Valley is back in the running, despite being even further from Cheney, where EWU is.
-----
Yesterday also was a red-letter day for food. We started with breakfast at The Old European Breakfast House, which is a lot like the name says. I got Eggs Benedict with a German Potato Pancake and Jenn got the Scandinavian Cake Platter, which included a crepe, three abelskivers, a couple pancakes, and a German Potato Pancake. It was all pretty amazing, from the real made-from-scratch Hollandaise to the nice, doughy, abelskivers. But the star was definitely the German Potato Pancakes, which rank up there with the best things I've ever eaten. This morning, we're headed back to the Old European and are both going to order just the potato pancakes.
At lunch, after a few apartments, we met with one of my City of Heroes friends, Ping, at Pete's Pizza, near Gonzaga. We all three ordered calzones. Monster calzones. I would guess that they were medium pizzas with double or triple toppings folded in half. The dough and sauce is reeeeally tasty and Ping and I tore through them.
Because of the giant breakfast and the enormous calzone, I didn't need dinner last night.
-----
Later today, we're headed back to Colorado. We're going to eat potato pancakes, glance at the outsides and neighborhoods of a few more apartments, and head out. Unless we plan reeeeally well and decide that fireworks are more important than getting home before the sun comes up, we won't be seeing any fireworks. I estimate that we'll be in the big, mostly empty spot between Billings and Casper about the time that fireworks start going. But what better way to celebrate the birth of our country than by driving across a third of it?
And yes, we're heading back the same way we came, despite the evility and mockishness of Montana. Our other option give us more Idaho, then Utah, including Salt Lake City, then the windiest parts of the Wyoming mountains...and it would still start off with about 4 hours of Montana.
Posted via email from Christopher Stuck on Posterous