We made it out of town yesterday, finally, shortly before 11. Lots of last minute details to attend to. We hope we didn't forget anything that is absolutely necessary. We ended up taking both back seats out of the Rav4 for the extra room for everything. We don't have a kitchen sink, but it seems like we have everything else... Once we get on the road we made good progress. Up the Gorge to Boardman. It was a beautiful day for traveling, brigtht and sunny, nice view of the river most of the way. The river getting progressively higher and higher as we passed each dam. Each of the three dams was spilling water, hopefully enough for the fish to fight their way upstream to spawn. We turned right to Umatilla and onto Pasco. Another right heading toward Spokane. Lot of farm country. Miles and miles of fields being plowed. Not sure what crop is grown there, I'm use to fields of wheat and corn this time of year. Anyway, we hit Spokane right at 5:00 and Friday rush hour traffic. Wasn't too bad, never having to stop completely. Spokane is right at the state line. It didn't take but maybe an hour or so to drive across Idaho. We started to hit some hills and mountain passes there. Trees, lot of trees in that part of Idaho. Green! A welcome change to the brown fields and rolling hills with sage brush in eastern Washington. We stopped for dinner somewhere around St Regis and were pleasently supprised to find that Montana is one of the few states that doesn't have sales tax yet. On the way to Missoula, an engine warning light came on. Its the one that actually looks like and engine. The owners manual said that basically, something is wrong, take it to a dealer to have it checked. Great! Just what we need on the first day of a driving vacation. The car still seemed to run fine, so on we went. Like we had much choice but to continue and hope it wasn't something serious. We got to Missoula, found a hotel and checked in sometime after 10 (Mountain Time, one hour later than Pacific Time) This morning we found the only Toyota dealer in Missoula and took the car in. Normally they only do oil changes on Saturday, but they found somebody to plug the diagnostic module into the car and run the tests. He noted some error codes and went off to find out what the problem was. It seems that there are a couple of sensors before and after the catalyst part of the emission control system. It seems that the information they were sending to the car's computer wasn't what was expected. So it turned on the warning light. It's ok to drive. It just might be letting out a bit more than it's suppose to in the exhaust system. What a relief. Considering what could have happened.... We thanked the mechanic profusely and were on our way. North to Glacier National Park and on to Canada.
It's late. I will post more in the morning. But first. I have to show these pictures of our winshield. Going through Idaho and especially through Montana we drove through clouds of bugs. Huge bugs. Lots of Bugs. Bugs committing suicide on our windshield.
At times it sounded like heavy rain hitting the car. This is what it looked like in the light of morning
It took a bit of elbow grease to clean that off!
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