Spokane

Spokane is a city located in the Northwestern United States in the state of Washington. With a population of 208,916, according to the 2010 Census, Spokane is the second largest city in Washington, and the third largest in the American portion of the Pacific Northwest, behind Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, and is the 100th largest city in the United States.

Spokane is home to many higher education institutions. They include the private universities, Gonzaga and Whitworth, and the public Community Colleges of Spokane system as well as an ITT Tech and University of Phoenix campus. While Spokane is one of the larger cities in the United States to lack a main campus of a state-supported university within its city limits, Eastern Washington University (EWU) and Washington State University (WSU) have operations at the Riverpoint Campus, just adjacent to downtown and across the Spokane River from the Gonzaga campus. The main EWU campus is located 15 miles (24 km) southwest of Spokane in nearby Cheney, and WSU is located 65 miles (105 km) to the south in Pullman.

Spokane in Supervolcano
Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had a successful show in Spokane where the university crowd enjoyed their act the previous year. On their current tour, the band met with equal success getting called back for two encores and selling plenty of autographed CDs. Finally, the management of "Harvey Wallbanger", the club they played in, didn't try to stiff them their fee like so many others tried to do.

The other high point was a local Vietnamese greasy spoon that served pho as good as any you could get in the U.S. The only place you could get better was Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as it used to be known and maybe again one day). This thought inspired Rob Ferguson to try to write a song about cities with more than one name. For instance, Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad to Volgograd or St. Petersburg to Petrograd to Leningrad and then back to St. Petersburg.