Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
Friday, February 4, 2011
We then embarked on our drive towards Seattle, stopping in a town just east of there called Spokane (although they say it like 'Spoke – anne') (actually the place we stayed was called ‘Couer d’Alene’). We found a nice little motel and went out for some beers and to play some pool. Andrew and I were happy with a few games, but Sam wanted to go out, so he found some friends at the pool place we were at and went out with them. Andrew and I played pool for an hour (cost only $5 – far cheaper than any pool hall I’ve been to in Melbourne!) and went home for a nice snooze. Sam didn’t come home until the next morning – after 8 am – and sported a huge black eye. Turns out one of the guys he’d gone with was a total nob and was playing with an empty pistol and pointing it at Sam and others. Sam also had some great photos of him holding up the guy’s M16 machine gun (no black eye at this point). Sam never could remember why he and the guy had blued, but he was very happy to be getting out the place asap. So we went to Spokane airport to investigate changing our car over for a better deal...
We ended up changing the car we’d rented from Hertz over there to rent with Alamo. It ended up being far cheaper in the long run (also they included insurance which Hertz never did) and also we’d come to seriously dislike the disjointed and incompetent service we’d been offered with Hertz. Alamo ended up upgrading us from a tiny Kia hatchback to a nice Dodge Charger (which was lucky because we would have had to dump Sam somewhere if we’d got the Kia!) and we left Spokane Airport very pleased with our swap.
