U.S. Highway 2 Road Trip, Part 2

One of our goals for this summer is to travel the length of U.S. Highway 2 from Washington to Michigan. It’s called the Great Northern route because it follows the Great Northern Railroad much of the way. We started the adventure in June with the Everett to Spokane segment. This past weekend we covered the Spokane to Kalispell piece.

For our trip in August we plan to go south a ways first and then do some camping southwest of Missoula before heading back up to Kalispell to pick up Highway 2 again. Rather than miss that piece of Route 2 we decided to make it into a weekend road trip.

Early Saturday morning we headed west to Spokane. As we got off the Interstate on Highway 2 we took a detour of a few blocks to Riverfront Park to take a picture off my favorite Spokane landmark, the giant Radio Flyer wagon. There are steps up into the bed of the wagon and then the handle is a slide.

Interstate 90 goes east and west through Spokane, but for north and south, Highway 2 is the main thoroughfare, right through the middle of the city. Naturally, there are lots of boring businesses along the highway, but this car dealership with all bright colors of inventory caught our eye as something unusual.

I had made a list of Little Free Libraries along our route. Lyle indulges me in this. He’s not a bit interested, but I love finding them. I think we stopped at 7 or 8 that day.

I’m hoping you’ll want to watch our video, so I’m not going to post all the pictures here, but it was a beautiful day for a drive across the scenic Idaho panhandle…

…until we got into Montana and noticed the wildfire smoke hanging in the air. Unfortunately, that seems to be the norm these days for this time of the year.

We spent the night in Libby, Montana. Sunday morning the smoke was even worse. The sun was trying to shine but it failed to brighten things up much. Still, it was a fun drive and we look forward to continuing east in a few weeks.

I hope you’ll subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow along with us throughout the summer. Your comments and “thumbs up” makes the adventure that much more fun for us!