After a final breakfast with our cousins in Seattle, we got on the road to Spokane. It was a 4 1/2 hour drive, the first hour and a half of which was gorgeous going through the Cascades. We passed a sign for Wenatchee, which made my sister cringe. When she was about nine years old, she was inadvertently left at the Safeway in Wenatchee (with 5 kids it’s hard to keep track of everyone!). It was only for a couple of minutes, but it had a pretty big impact on her and she has never let us forget it.
We arrived at our Airbnb, an RV on ‘The Funny Farm’. The RV was situated between the chicken coop and the pig pen, and we were warmly greeted by the two goats, Cheddar and Faith. The goats were very interested when they saw us take the cooler out of the car and tried to follow us into the RV to see what food we had.
We got settled in and then drove into Spokane to see our Aunt Ruthie. It was her 70th birthday and we were excited to be able to celebrate with her. We picked up our cousin Rebecca, who we found out lived with dogs named Winston and Javi, obviously very popular names in our family. We had a very filling meal of delicious Chinese food at a restaurant called Happiness. After a lot more catching up and taking photos, we went back to our Airbnb ready for a good nights sleep.
The next day we went on a tour of family related sites in Spokane and Loon Lake where we used to go during the summer when we were kids. We stopped at Granite Point, the place we would go to get gas for the boat and discovered the game room still had the same video games from the mid-80s, and apparently the jukebox had not been updated since that time as well! The playground was very old school with a metal slide (it was 100 degrees yesterday so likely wasn’t used much) and a merry-go-round. They also had tetherball!
After that we drove over to our step grandma‘s cabin and were happy to see one of her great grandsons was enjoying the cabin for the summer.
Next we went back into Spokane to see my grandma and grandpa‘s old house and spend a little time in their neighborhood, including the beautiful Manito Park. My aunt told us stories about waiting on the corner for her dad to come home from work, hanging out with her friends and my dad spending all his free time at the fire station across the street (he did the same thing at the fire station next to our house, I’m sure it had nothing to do with a house with so many daughters).
After another good meal (we’ve discovered that Spokane has good food), we dropped Ruth off and went back to the Funny Farm. Diane, the owner, was there and showed us how she milks the goats, told us all about her bunny rabbits, and we got to feed the pigs marshmallows, which is apparently a great treat for them. There are quite a few campers here using Harvest Host and I can see why. The farm is only a few miles off the freeway and it is such a wonderful spot.
