Coeur D’Alene & Wallace, Idaho

[Part one, two, three, four, five, six]

The end of our trip came quickly. Just like all trips do. The beginning feels like a slow and steady pace. The middle starts to dominate, and before long you’re packing your bag to head home. It sneaks up on you. I spent a lot of time wishing we could have done more, but there isn’t anything too relaxing about running yourself into the ground trying to see anything and everything.

We stayed in an Airbnb while in Coeur D’Alene. It was another detached unit from the main house. They converted their garage into an apartment. It was incredibly clean and cozy. The location was walkable to the lake or downtown, and they even had bikes you could borrow [not that we did].

Coeur D’Alene was a destination on our tour, sure, but it also served as the last stop before the 6+ hour drive home. The city is known for its lake, mostly, so we spent a lot of time walking down by the lake or through town and back at the apartment reflecting on all that we had seen throughout the past few weeks. It’s a lot to digest, and if you don’t write it down in some fashion, you will forget. It’s inevitable.

Since most of this part of the trip was relaxing and redundant, I’ll spare you the mundane details. Highlights included: eating pork tacos and garlic fries and drinking local beer at Crafted Tap House, starting the day with coffee and scones at Calypso Coffee, finally washing the car off from all the road grime, eating our weight in sushi at Syringa Japanese Cafe, and watching the Champions League Final at Capone’s Pub & Grill.

An extremely memorable part of the trip was the time we spent in Wallace, Idaho, a silver-mining town. It’s a small little piece of history. It’s mostly known for being where Dante’s Peak was filmed, but I think you should go there to grab a beer from Wallace Brewing Company and to take a tour of the Oasis Bordello Museum. The bordello was active up until 1988 when the madam and the ladies of the establishment left town because the FBI was coming to visit. Nearly everything was exactly as it was since they left in such a hurry. It’s an amazing piece of history, even if it is a bit seedy.

The heat affects Coeur D’Alene in the summer something fierce, despite being on the lake. We didn’t end up in the water at all, but I wanted to.

It’s a different sort of ending to a trip to come home from a long drive in your car versus a really long flight. The car turned into a moving closet with all the crap I felt like we packed around. We felt infinitely lazier than when we’re out of the country because of the car, too. The number of miles spent on foot dwindles considerably when you have a car at your disposal. The sites are generally more spread out out here anyway.

The takeaways from this trip were: 1) America is beautiful, 2) I’m thankful for national parks, 3) people at national parks can be generally stupid when they treat it like Disneyland, 4) there is good food everywhere, 5) I could live in Montana [or Jackson, Wyoming, once I with the lottery], and 6) saying yes to pretty much everything is usually a good idea. How else are you going to see the world’s largest potato chip and tour a bordello museum?