Test Brakes

Now we are in Spokane, WA. This is a really nice small city with river rapids running through the middle of it and a nice concentrated downtown shopping center that seems like European kind of thing because the mall is actually built into older buildings rather than sat in the middle of a parking lot outside of town. I’ve used the bathroom in the theater twice and was both times run in on by a female employee of the theater. I like the attitude. Most people here drive around with studded snow tires on their cars. Since there is no snow, this leads to a collective cat-on-kitchen-floor skid on the wet pavement at each stop light. This is no place to jaywalk; they cannot stop very quickly.

I’ve yet to find espresso that I would call great. This is despite there being coffee shops two per block, which have incidentally seemed routinely under-patronized. One pair (actually two pairs in our filthy musician speak) of coffee girls at a chic looking place charged me only a dollar for espresso because they thought it was not a difficult order. I was tempted to do the old “how about I give you two dollars and you let me make it myself” kind of schtick, but no. There’s a small chain here called Thomas Hammer which is very into the cross marketing and not very into the having-ceramic-cups business. This has been the best espresso so far and they also sell playground balls and sumo dolls with the store logo on it. Cute.

When we stopped in Billings, MT the other day on the airplane (too much luggage, not enough gas) we were within sight of a German kid who I read about. He bought a ticket to Sidney, MT (which is a puddle jump from Billings) instead of Sydney, Australia. He spent Sunday-Wednesday in the Billings airport waiting for money to continue his journey. Now he’s internationally known to those who use the internet as serious business and probably watched us land and take off late Monday night.