Our fourth of July weekend was more than a little odd, which is why I haven’t quite pulled myself together enough to post on what we ate.

It all started with a birthday party…

My grandfather was turning 98, so of course we had a party. Strawberries have just come in like gangbusters in our area, so we brought a flat, and my mother made yogurt cake and a checkerboard layer cake. It was all very festive and tasty. There were many relatives.

Then came a really swell noodle salad, followed by a long drive east. My father cooked Chinese egg noodles and grilled marinated thin-cut beef and tofu while I stir-fried cabbage and zucchini to toss with it. It was extremely good the first night, but the leftovers served an invaluable purpose, giving us something to eat while we sat in the park at Grand Coulee Dam the next evening waiting for our turn to play on the music stage for the Festival of America.

The mayor of Coulee Dam put us up in a hotel up on the hill. Many of the rooms had little balconies facing the dam, presumably so people could watch the nightly laser light show without leaving their rooms (or their beer). Our room faced the UFO-ish Crown Point viewpoint perched on top of the coulee, which on the whole I preferred. It was one of the stranger hotels I’ve stayed in.

The next morning (which was the 4th of July) we got breakfast at the R&A Cafe, a small diner set into our hotel, facing the Coulee Dam Casino. It wasn’t a bad little place, although the coffee was kind of spectacularly awful. The eggs and bacon were perfectly fine, though, and the biscuits and gravy surprisingly good.

We drove all the way home (the morning light on Banks Lake and the Grand Coulee was gorgeous), put together a dinner of beef kebabs, salad and flatbread, and watched our hometown fireworks display. We felt, perhaps, just a bit disoriented.