1. It turned out that the coffee situation at the apartment I rented wasn't what I wanted. It's been a while since I've stayed at an airbnb and I must remember any time I do it again to take my own coffee, filter, and filter holder and make sure I have milk on hand.
The good news is that I was staying not too far from Rocket Bakery on Garland, so once I got packed up, I dashed up there for a superb cup of coffee and a delicious hazelnut scone.
By going to Rocket, I (once again) broke my pact of trying all new places on this trip, but, as with going to Jack and Dan's, I have a lot of great memories attached to Rocket Bakery and didn't mind going to a familiar place.
But, I dined out for breakfast, as planned, in place I'd never been when I drove down Monroe St. a ways to Elliotts An Urban Kitchen and was I ever glad I did.
Elliotts is single room cafe with booths along part of its south wall, tables with regular chairs and other tables with high chairs. Elliots serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner and has a full service bar.
If it were 2003 instead of 2023, I might have ordered a Bloody Mary to enjoy with my breakfast, but I didn't want to mess with booze at 9:15 a.m. today.
Elliotts brunch menu had plenty of offerings. The Eggs Benedict looked really good, but I didn't want meat as rich as ham, but, to my delight, Elliotts also offered a Veggie Benedict with home fries and that sounded just right.
And it was delicious. The Hollandaise sauce was light and flavorful, the eggs on the English muffin were perfectly prepared, and the red pepper, onion, avocado, spinach, tomatoes, and jalapeños were a perfect crunchy and smooth combination of sweet and heat.
The home fries were also delicious.
So was the coffee!
I ventured back to the Camry nourished and fulfilled.
2. I enjoy driving around the Whitworth campus and neighborhood, trying to piece together memories from forty to nearly fifty years ago and observing how the University has expanded.
After this nostalgic tour, I headed south and went to Huckleberries and bought beers for Debbie and me to sample, including a couple of cans of the Fluffy Puffy Sunshine I'd enjoyed last night at Wooden City.
I returned to downtown, got the Camry parked, and by about 1:00 found my seat in the IMAX theater.
My whole reason for coming to Spokane this weekend was to watch the re-release of the Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert movie, originally released in about 1984, on the huge IMAX screen and to hear the movie through the theater's incredible sound system.
Surely I've seen Stop Making Sense at least twenty times. I saw it in two different movie theaters when it came out, in Eugene and Portland, I went to at least three, if not more, dance parties centered on this movie playing and we partiers dancing. I rented the movie regularly, played it for my World Lit class when we had our Dada Day, and I regularly go to YouTube to watch clips from the movie, especially "Life During Wartime".
I have multitudes of great memories tied up in Stop Making Sense. It's a movie that has stimulated and shaped much of my thinking about absurdity, about art that puts radically dissimilar things side by side.
It's a joyous movie, full of energy, dancing, theatrics, superb musicianship, awesome singing, a wide variety of musical styles and genres, and great fun.
I had an emotionally satisfying time today watching Stop Making Sense again, reveling in the hugeness of the concert unfolding on the IMAX screen, letting my mind wander through countless memories and friendships and fun days teaching all attached to this movie.
I swear, if I lived in Spokane, I'd return to the IMAX every day the movie is showing. I love it that much.
I did not want Stop Making Sense to end this afternoon, but, alas, it did, and sat in my seat and stared while theater workers cleaned the theater and then left the auditorium and sat at a table and stared some more, let the movie and all it means to me sink in more.
In time, my head cleared.
It felt safe for me to drive.
I left Spokane.
3. On my way home, I stopped in at Bottle Joy in Coeur d'Alene. My plan was to drink one beer and to buy some more cans of beer for Debbie and me to split back in Kellogg.
To my utter surprise and delight, I discovered a beer I didn't know had even been brewed on Bottle Joy's tap list.
For years, I've enjoyed Firestone Walker's Double Barrel Ale -- I've written about this before.
Double Barrel Ale was the first beer Firestone Walker brewed to sell.
To commemorate the 10,000th batch of beer to come out of their Paso Robles Brewhouse, Firestone Walker brewed a batch of Double Double Barrel Ale aged for a year in 11 year Old Fitzgerald Bourbon barrels.
Gawd!
Weighing in at 12.3% ABV (I only drank eight ounces of it), all of the toffee sweetness of the Double Barrel Ale was magnified and complimented by the boozy brown sugary presence of the bourbon. For me, it was like drinking a perfectly baked oatmeal cookie that had been wrapped in bourbon soaked cheesecloth.
I worked my way to the bottom of this sweet malt and bourbon bomb very slowly, let the pleasant heat of the alcohol move me into a state of mild euphoria, and then sat for a while and drank water before gathering up the six beers I selected out of the cooler and heading back to Kellogg.
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