Coeur d'Alene

Coeur d'Alene is a city, a lake, a bicycle trail, and probably the name of a hundred different businesses, but who would want to start a business name with this hard-to-spell, hard-to-pronounce name??? Of course French-speaking fur traders named Coeur d'Alene Lake after an indian tribe by that name. Leave it to the French!

We arrived here on Tuesday afternoon. We are in the city RV park -- our site is about 10-feet from the shoreline. SO nice with a cool breeze all the time. And the best part is that it is adjacent to the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes bicycle trail -- 70+ miles of VERY smooth asphalt. Right around the lake and up through the forest. Breathtaking ( in more ways than one!). Yesterday we rode about 20 miles and then turned around -- we had planned on going all the way to Plummer but Chuck realized he had lost his keys to the MoHo and we thought it would be best to re-trace our path to see if we could find them. Fortunately a group of people walking the trail had seen them and left them in a conspicuous location for us. Nice that we didn't have to "break into" the MoHo when we got back to our site.

So after that trial ride we got up this morning and started out for Plummer once again. We had a great ride -- saw several eaglets in nests along the path -- some nests out in the lake -- shared the path at one time with a white-tailed deer, saw a pileated woodpecker (we had not seen one since we were in Canada one year with Gary) lots of wildflowers and ferns everywhere. soaring pine trees, and an unusual bridge across the lake.

This bridge was originally a railroad bridge, but was converted for the trail. They raised the center so boats could go under it -- and they made the bridge with little level spaces in it so it wouldn't be so hard to climb on our bicycles. I think you can follow the line of the railing to see what I mean by that last statement.

Tomorrow we are heading westward again. On Greg's suggestion we will take highway #20 west and stop at Grand Coulee (sp) dam. Besides wanting to see the dam, there is a laser light show on the dam each night at 10pm throughout the summer. We definitely want to see that too. Probably won't have WiFi tomorrow night so this it for a day or so. I have been going to the library for WiFi since we got to Harrison. Nice that the libraries provide this service. I am going to leave a little donation on my way out today.