Rogers60

I never went anywhere that Boy Scout troop 42 didn't take me while growing up in Spokane. I only visited Couer d' Alene three times yet could see the higher parts of state line from my house. Seattle may as well have been Paris. Thus I jumped at the chance to board one of the two buses heading to Seattle to the state basketball tournament in 1957.

We departed Rogers on old US 10 sometime after midnight. We were the second bus. The lead bus was one of those bullet-shaped jobs with a medallion on the rear. I had never seen Ritzville, Moses Lake, or Ellensburg. I surveyed them as we whizzed through. I marveled how abruptly the Cascades started  after Cle Elum.  Yup. I'd been well-confined to NE Spokane.

Snow was blown by the plows into drifts higher than the bus. At daybreak we stopped for breakfast at the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. It was in a Bavarian chalet-type building. Today as I drive across that summit, I wonder if any of the present chalets are that one.

We traversed the floating bridge and Renton. Then we arrived in downtown Seattle and de-bussed. I was hooked up with Ron Waldo, a Cooper classmate that lived two blocks from me. We were to stay with one of his cousins that lived on the east side of Lake Union near the University of Washington campus. We didn't know how to use the Seattle transit system, so we started walking, carrying suitcases. It rained, of course. After a couple of miles, we found the house okay.