Washington & Montanta Trip: Spokane Portion

Our last morning in Tri-Cities was a busy one. I got up, cleaned, packed up, took garbages out, and checked all over about 3 times before I felt we had officially grabbed everything. We decided the girl's needed some good wiggle time before hitting the road again so we stopped at Howard Amon Park. It was such a fun and pretty park too! There were lots of playground equipment, it was near the river, and had lots of trees. We saw tons of squirrels and birds (and even taught Cara to throw some pizza crust for the birds haha).

Right before 12 we ate our leftover pizza for lunch and then headed out. We had wanted to stop in some small cities we found online that we thought might be good start up areas for us. Our plan was to stop in Pullman and Uniontown. What we ended up doing was driving through Colfax on our way to Pullman and decided that was enough of small towns on the road and headed straight to Spokane haha. Colifax was TINY (population of 3,000) and Pullman was a mostly college town (population about 33,000), but still semi small. It's hard when you can't find good grocery stores nearby.

As we drove into Spokane I was very impressed, there were so, so many trees! It was gorgeous! Then we got to Spokane Downtown, where our Airbnb was closer to. It felt pretty sketchy and was small and very old (the kitchen gave me very weird flashbacks to awful houses I've been in before). I got more worried when some random guy came to the front door, put a knife in his pocket and asked or "Nicky"...no idea what that was about. Luckily he never came back.

We ended up hitting up Target for some groceries and stopped at this Italian restaurant that was AWFUL, so disappointing! We did end up driving around downtown Spokane for a bit, which just made me wish we had gotten a place closer to Spokane Valley. It ended up being a late night and we found that having one shared bathroom in the whole place was a bit difficult, but we were excited to check out this new area the next morning.

Our official whole day for Spokane was very well spent! We got up, ate, and got ready for the day and then hit up a playground. Unfortunately, we had no idea it would be 45 degrees - much to cold for no sweaters or sleeves. I made a plan to hit up Target to get us some sweaters for the rest of this trip (because I only packed for warm weather). We ended up walking around this large park (with very large trees - can you tell I'm obsessed with the nature here?) to warm up, but even at the end Cara kept saying "I'm cold" (a first for her haha). We did end up hitting two custom builders after the park. One's office was just the design center, with no one inside to help us, and the other one was even less helpful! The guy didn't seem to want to sell to us and the things that weren't included in the price was ridiculous (no driveway and we had to pay for port-a-potties to be there, among other things).

We headed back to the Airbnb for lunch (salads and pb&j) and naps. During nap time I found some cheap homes in the area to check out.

After nap time we went to Target to get sweaters (I could only find a decent one in the men's section, so I got a small) and then we went to a Children's Museum for a fun activity for the girls. This place was amazing! It definitely went on the "reasons we should move here" list. It had lots of great activity ideas for kids of all ages and both girls really loved it. After that, we drove around neighborhoods to check out the homes for sale and then headed to a steakhouse for dinner (one that ended up on a top food places we stopped by on this trip).

The best part of this leg of the trip is Cara started pointing out shapes and letters she saw on the road signs and randomly singing ABCs and doing her 123's. I felt at this point that if we accomplish nothing else, at least we know she learned something on it.

Unfortunately, Spokane wasn't as great as we had hoped, but it was still a great stop and we're having fun on this trip!