A short jump from Coeur d’Alene to Spokane for the GetLit! Fest. Too much free wine, too nice of a hotel and a fantastic downtown/park. Mostly I walked around being surprised by how nice of a city this is. I’d only visited once before, and that was just to fill a U-Haul truck with boxes of my cousin Doug Peacock‘s book, Walking It Off. The press that published it was getting the axe, so we bought up all their stock. I was in town only long enough to load up.

So it was great to be able to spend a few days and realize how much this city has going on. After my reading at the festival, sharing a stage with a fantastic memoirist, Julie Riddle, who’s book The Solace of Stones is a powerfully honest look at childhood, wilderness and the endless paradox of Montana, someone asked me if I’d been to the waterfall yet. I had seen signs for it in the park and for some reason pictured a small run of whitewater cascading over rocks, maybe a couple dozens yards worth of drop — pretty, but not a huge priority.

Why that was my assumption, I have no idea. I’d forgotten the importance of remaining open to everything while on the road (0r anywhere for that matter). But, if someone says, “you should go see this,” it’s important to remember the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

[Read more reports from the Hundred Highways Tour here.]