Catherine wanted to get down to Lewiston yesterday, to stop by the JC Penny's because they were having a huge sale.  Some of it was needing clothing, some of it was needing Drapes for our house to help deal with heat loss around our two huge slider doors.  Unfortunately, we weren't able to find any drapes we liked that weren't going to cost an arm an a leg.

The trip down was decent.  We went to Moscow for the Farmer's Market, where we'd picked up a bunch of vegetables and a gallon of honey to last us through winter, so we just took 95 due south.  The drive was nice, and there are a few spots where you get a fantastic view of the Palouse from a few hundred feet up, I hadn't realized you could get that far off the Palouse without leaving terra firma. Of course, the road down into Lewiston is about a 7% grade, which was pretty intense.  The Mazda really hated that on our way out of town.  In a sense, it made me glad I didn't get a job down there, because the gas would have been a bitch.

Lewiston as a town reminded me a lot of Billings.  I suppose it should, since it's the largest town between Spokane and Boise, the Tri-Cities and Missoula.  Pullman and Moscow are nice, but they're fairly small towns, and I'm not sure they'll even be very big towns outside of their respective Universities.  Which is fine.  I actually rather like Moscow. 

However, the steep hill into town is only the beginning of crazy things in the town.  The entire town is really, really hilly.  The Taco Time we stopped at for Lunch had an incredibly steep entry, which made it tricky to get out, as the road was reasonably busy.  The highway into town has an intersection where two east-west roads come together with the main north-south drag.  Finding yourself in the wrong lane is easy enough, but even if you're in the correct lane, it can be terrifying enough. 

But then, we came across my favorite part of the entire town.  The Safeway is perched high on this hill, the sides of which have been carved flat and had these enormous bricks placed along them.  It looks the perfect vantage for a medieval  castle, not a grocery store.  I tried really hard to get a good picture, but the only camera I had was my cell phone, which is really, really bad quality.

The trip aside from that was pretty non-eventful.  Catherine shopped, we didn't buy any drapes, and I talked to AT&T about the upgrade to my phone plan I'm going to need when I buy a smartphone in December.  The Penny's already had Christmas decorations up.  Christmas.  In October.  One of these days I'm going to head into a department store in March and there are going to be Christmas Decorations up.