Towards Oregon

We had several more days to kill in smoky Missoula, so what do you do, you eat:-)  We found a Chinese restaurant we thought was so good we had remorse we had never been there in all the times we have been in Missoula.  The China Garden.

Exceptional Hot and Sour soup, perhaps the best we've ever had!

Kung Pao chicken served with a little "hot" sauce

House Lo Mein, yummy!

Then we went poking around and found a great grocery store with fresh, flown in from Alaska, King Salmon.  

King Salmon

With sautéed Bok Choy

Then we hit the Irish pub, Stone of Accord for lunch and of course a couple of Guinness's. 

Corned Beef and cole slaw with homemade chips

Great Rueben with awesome Champs!

The smoke just wouldn't give it up, so what to do?  Go back and get more Chinese.

Spicy shrimp noodle bowl

Stellar Mu Shu Pork

Then just before we were planning to leave in came the weather, it rained most of a day, temps only in the low 50's, and it cleared the air for 36 hours before the smoke came back.  But it was glorious.

A hint on our itinerary changes, we are ready to leave the west, sounds weird, even to us, especially after all these years of coming out here and loving it, but I guess the repetition, the heat, and especially the smoke this year spoke to us, so we are going to head east much sooner.  More details will be forthcoming.  

So we did get off to Kennewick, WA for a few nights and that put us in position to drive the 80 miles to Yakima to pick up our generator part.  It is about 350 miles from Missoula to Kennewick and for the first 250 or so there was almost no smoke, we were celebrating, but as it turned out way too soon.  As we approached Kennewick it became more and more intense really restricting visibility.  We tried to sit out our first night and made it only a little while until the smoke drove us back inside.  

Now I will say I made an error ordering the part from Yakima Cummins instead of Eugene, OR Cummins.  We drove up to Yakima and wanted to make it a day, we picked up the part, went to Costco, out to lunch, then headed back.  What we couldn't believe it was even smokier in town, you could watch it blow and billow down the street.  Made it hard to breathe.  Now on to my screwup, the generator part was $605, but when I went in to pick it up the first thing that amazed me was there was a sign on the door that I would have to have my temperature taken and would be asked questions before I could come in??????  This stuff was common more than a year ago, but not now.  I went in and although no one took my temp, the entire counter was partitioned off with plastic sheeting and each position, there were three were all partitioned off from each other!?!  I said was this for the new Delta, and was told since Cummins is an international company, this was their company policy.  Ridiculous in my opinion.  Anyway, he said that will be $689, say what??  Well there is shipping, that I was never told about, and $55 in taxes!!  If I had waited until Oregon there is no sales tax, oh well it's only money.  Then off to Costco, and we find that perhaps 85% of the people in the store are masked.  That is their business, but understand this is the first we have seen masks anywhere on our travels.  Jan finds some fresh Dungeness crab, hmm, with some picking we could probably have crab cocktails twice:-)  We almost blew off getting lunch with the smoke, but were so glad we didn't, we had an absolutely fantastic delicious lunch with excellent service and our mask issue was eased as no one working or in as a customer was wearing a mask.  The restaurant is called Cowitche Canyon.

Calamari

Apple, chicken, cheddar, peas, and lettuce salad

Prime Rib dip with shoestring fries

So back to the campground and since we still had some time, and had just pulled the part out and knew we could do it quickly, we installed the new part, but since we were in a campground we couldn't run the generator more than a few minutes.  But no surges so far.

So then we picked the Dungeness crab clusters, got almost a pound of meat, and made cocktails for happy hour.

Delicious and huge!

They were so big we had veggies for dinner:-)

We will head to Oregon soon, and hopefully we will be able to run the generator to determine if we stopped the surging.  Catch you in Oregon.