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MAY 20, 2011
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ConfCuence
M'iiTamette \aCCey LCjXTChorus
PRESENTS
travel
W W W .JUSTOUT.COM
The Roads Less
T raveled
Discovering the other Pacific Northwest
BY ANDREW COLLINS
rxSâü
Now Through May
31st save up to 20%
on all dining furniture
A concert of songs
to lift your spirits
and soothe your soul
SALEM
Friday June 3, 7:30
PORTLAND
Saturday June 4, 7:30
CORVALLIS
Sunday June 5,4:30
goto
www.confluencechorus.org
to purchase tickets online
and for direction to each venue.
Also find us on Facebook.
Sponsored by Oregon AFSCME
H 8S
Maintenance • Repairs • Smiles.
For Your Car
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visit Vision162.com
360 . 944.1911
Spokane and Sandpoint: These aren’t your
typical Portland road-trip destinations. But
early last October, I set off on a six-month
on-and-off-again cross-country road trip,
and visited both places. Spokane—a rugged,
no-nonsense metropolis that made its for
tunes on mining, lumber and agribusiness—
feels about as different from swank-and-
shiny Seattle as a city in the same state could.
In Sandpoint, I discovered a surprisingly
progressive and urbane sensibility that belies
this small, lakeside town’s location in the
heart of Northern Idaho’s conservative pan
handle. If your weekend travels rarely tempt
you east of the Cascades, you might consider
a trip to this increasingly gay-friendly part o f
the interior Northwest.
I hadn’t been to Spokane (visitspokane.
com) in 10 years. The drive from
Portland took six hours, much of it
through the spectacular scenery of
the Columbia Gorge— it’s worth
road-tripping if you have the time,
ideally if you can spare an extra
night along the way, perhaps in the
superb yet still underrated wine
making center o f Walla Walla,
which requires just a 90-minute
detour. A far simpler option is fly
ing— Southwest and Horizon offer
multiple direct flights each day, and
you can usually snag a round-trip
fare for under $150.
1 pulled into Spokane just as the
sun began to drop over the sur
rounding Selkirk Mountains, which shim
mered in autumnal hues of orange, crimson,
russet and gold. Spokane has a handful of
distinctive, design-minded hotels and inns— I
spent the night at my favorite o f the hunch,
the Montvale (montvalehotel.com), an atmo
spheric hotel in an 1899 building, its 36
rooms replete with high ceilings, fluffy beds
and spacious tile bathrooms. 1 also ate dinner
here, in a cozy basement space called— ap
propriately— Catacombs Pub, where brick-
oven pizzas and local microbrews stand out
on a menu o f hearty comfort foods. Just off
the Montvale’s lobby, elegant Scratch Res
taurant 6c Lounge is another of the city’s top
restaurants. O ther hotels in Spokane worth a
look include the intimate and historic Hotel
Lusso (hotellusso.com) and the reasonably
priced, conveniently located Red Lion Hotel
at the Park (redlion.rdln.com).
In this part of the country, the farther east
you go, the redder the politics. But Spokane
has a more visible and pronounced gay scene
than you might imagine, and although M c
Cain edged Obama 49 percent to 48 percent
in Spokane County in 2008, the city itself
grows steadily more liberal with each passing
year. Spokane hosts a good-sized Gay Pride
celebration in mid-June (June 11 this year),
and although gay nightlife is limited for a
city o f 210,000, there are a pair of cool hang
outs within walking distance of downtown
hotels: Dempsey’s Brass Rail— the larger and
more established of the two— and Irv’s Bar,
which is more mixed gay/straight. 1 met
plenty of chatty locals, including a few stu
dents from Gonzaga University, which has
an active on-campus LGBT resource center.
The following morning—one of those
crisp, sunny autumn days tailor-made for
strolling— I set out for a walk around the
scenic downtown riverfront, which is an
chored by lush parkland and crisscrossed by
pedestrian bridges, and has been a focal point
of a downtown renaissance over the past de
cade. After stopping for espresso and snacks
at the hip coffeehouse, Thomas Hammer
Roasters, I set out by car to explore farther
afield. South of downtown along a sheer pali
sade, I pulled my car over on Cliff Drive to
soak up the panoramic views o f the down
town skyline. Next I checked out the lovely
Browne’s Addition neighborhood, home to
dozens of gracious Victorian mansions (in
cluding the gay-friendly Roberts Mansion
B&B, the exceptional Northwest Museum of
Arts and Culture and a terrific neighborhood
eatery, Italia Trattoria).
By 3 p.m., I was off to Sandpoint, Idaho, a
town I’d never even heard of until a few years
ago, when a woman whose PR firm repre
sents the Sandpoint Chamber o f Commerce
(sandpointchamber.org) approached me on
Twitter, extolling the community’s laid-back,