Karla's Blog

June 7, 2021

Doesn’t “Kettle Falls” just sound like a charming little town with waterfalls and cute little shops all over the place? A good lesson here is . . . don’t judge a town by its name! We ended up reserving a spot at an RV Park in Kettle Falls for 2 nights. We’d have to pay but at least we had water and electric hookups. The park was decent and it had a laundry . . . and we had a pile of laundry to do!

There was a pretty nice forest and a long path that led down to the Kettle River which was a nice walk for the boys (and us). 

We spent a lot of time driving around because it was HOT (90’s). So we did some exploring and found that, sadly, both Colville and Kettle Falls are very run down and junky looking areas as were most of the small rural towns we saw in Washington. Of course, there was the occasional cute little shop or cafe but, overall, they are not places we would want to live. The outskirts though are very pretty and driving through Colville National Forest was amazing! We did get the most awesome ice cream cones at a place called Sandy’s in Kettle Falls. That helped with the 96 degree weather that day ;-D .

On our way back from exploring we saw something ahead in the middle of the road. As we got closer we realized it was a black bear! What??? As we stopped it looked at us and then scrambled up an embankment. WOW!

Larry said it looked big for a black bear. I’ll take his word for it because I’d never seen a black bear in the wild before. What a surprise treat!

Aside from the bear (and getting the laundry done LOL) the most exciting thing that happened while we were there was seeing (and hearing) a Navy fighter jet fly very low overhead. It was literally barely above the trees! It was super loud and it went SUPER FAST!!! OMGosh, it startled us but it was soooo cool! Apparently there is a naval air base in the area and they do training over the Columbia River and these low fly bys are a regular thing! Makes we want to watch TOP GUN!!

On our last morning we enjoyed muffins and coffee outside before packing up. We heard the  jet again but couldn’t see it this time. The boys were unimpressed. They just wanted our muffins.

To be continued . . .