Dude, we were in the middle of the state

September started off... super awesome.  For Tammy's birthday this year I bought her tickets to a Dave Matthews and Avett Brothers concert at the Gorge in Washington.  Here is the Gorge:

It is about a 10 hour drive the the Gorge.  We drove the first 8 hours through Alberta and BC, including Yahk, to Spokane.   We had MANY laughs, including not telling all the truth at the border. 




In Spokane we stayed at a lovely hotel, The Davenport, which was very based on African animals, and had a really nice dinner, Clinkerdaggers.  Spokane was... nice.  You could see the recession had more of an effect in Spokane then Calgary.  But the city itself is beautiful.   We headed down to check out the pool and fitness and heard a couple of guys talking about the concert we were heading to the next day.  One guy said "Dude that's in the middle of the state", which again made us laugh, as we had been travelling all day, and we tend to laugh when people use the word dude, as part of their normal vocabulary. 

The next day we looked for a Target, which I did not find, but I did find us Target Tires (damn iphone maps).  Then we headed to Moses Lake, which was a nice little city.  There I had a delicious asian salad, which I have duplicate, many times now at home.  Then we headed to the concert...

We were in general admisson, so we headed in early to sit on the lawn.  Once we got our customary concert t-shirts (which I have quite a collection of), we found a spot on the lawn.  After that we got the most difficult bottle of wine I have ever bought.  Took 3 trips and once we had to leave our blanket with strangers. 


The concert was.... interesting.  Avett Brothers were fantastic.  Later that night, we we were trying fall asleep in our Econolodge, I was trying to find some of the great songs from the Avett Brothers.  They are crazy songs, and while listening to them, I said, if we hadn't been to the concert we would never listen to these songs, but now we've heard them life, we have this affinity to them.  Which made us laugh uncontrollably.... again.    Any the Avett Brothers were great, loved their energy, loved the music.  They sang my favorite song of that moment.

Next were Dave Matthews Band.  Now I've always considered myself a Dave Matthews fan.  But for the three and a half hours he played I knew one song.  And they spend lots of time "jammin", some of the songs seemed to be 30 minutes long.  It's the first time in a long time I went a concert and wasn't able to sing along with most of the songs.

After that the rest of the story is pretty down hill...saw the Northern lights, a deer sleeping at the side of the road, sleeping at the Econolodge, friendlier border guy coming back into Canada, lots of traffic in the Crowsnest pass...

But it was a great way to spend labour day weekend.  If you ever get a chance to go to this beautiful venue I highly recommend it.

Jenn