Neither will most of that small burg’s residents as we’re back on the road quickly, turning North and heading for lakeside Chelan, our overnight stop. The sky is darkening, and soon the rumpled high grey clouds turn purplish with the fading light, the stained hem of an apron used to carry freshly picked blackberries.
  Lake Chelan. Click image to enlarge |
The windshield of the fast-moving Audi becomes insect armageddon as we whisk through the warm air along the water. The navigation is spouting a nonsensical hundred-mile circumnavigation, so we ignore it and head West, the onboard computer finally snapping out of it with mere miles to go. Roll in, unpack, nightcap, bed.
In the night, the storm comes.
At three a.m., both iPhones scream to life with flash flood warnings, and then lightning strikes the lake. The rains come lashing in against the windows, and thunder shakes the house, as if Zeus and Thor are having an arm-wrestling match. The stutter-flash and rumble go on for hours.
In the morning, the ditches are filled with dirty water the colour of chocolate milk, and fans of gravel show where midnight streams once coursed across the road. With coffee under our belts, we cross a bridge, head up into foothills and fog, and finally find ourselves on the other side, in the flatlands of Eastern Washington.
  Grand Coulee Dam. Click image to enlarge |
The road runs out before us, unbroken and empty, with golden fields to the left and right. Dire Straits is playing on the stereo – Telegraph Road – and as we pass under the long strings of high-voltage power lines, it’s as if we’re driving down the fretboard of Mark Knopfler’s sunburst Les Paul.
Then the road rises back up and we’re into the clouds again, coming around the bend to find the Grand Coulee Dam laid out before us. The largest concrete structure in the world, it seems to bend the landscape with its massy presence as we stop at a desolate hilltop lookout to take it all in.
Luck is with us and not with us: as we trail through town, I notice a regular thump coming from up front. We pull over in a parking lot to check the massive treads for a rock stuck in there, and there’s a sudden hiss that matches my deflating spirits. We’ve somehow picked up a nail: two flat tires in three days.
  One does not simply drive into Mordor. Click image to enlarge |
It could be worse. Grand Coulee is small, but big enough to have a tire shop capable of making a repair. There’s a little league game on the TV, and the other techs are all changing knobbly tractor tires. From flat to back on the road takes under an hour.
The next hour or so has me checking the onboard tire pressures every ten minutes, convinced we’re going to get another flat and get stuck out in the middle of nowhere. The rains return, and soon we’re back in a misty landscape, scarred by fires. Tree trunks are blackened and burst, the hillsides scorched. It looks like Mordor.
