Becky returned from McCall on Tuesday afternoon. Yea! We spent the rest of the day unpacking and unwinding, with a stop at the local sushi place to get Becky her periodic fix.
Sitting next to us at the restaurant was a young girl from Huntington Beach, California, and her grandfather, who is a local. It was his first try at sushi. Naturally, we enjoyed watching him struggle through it. He was a trouper, though.
Early Wednesday morning, I dropped Ramsey off at the kennel, and we headed for the guy who was going to align the wheels on our trailer.
He predicted that it would take several hours to do the job, so we killed the time having breakfast at Shari’s Restaurant, stopping at the sushi place from the night before to retrieve my Discover card which I had left there, doing a little shopping at Albertsons, and working with our computers in the Rec room at our RV park.
At 5:00PM, we re-sited the trailer at the RV park, took the rental car (a nice Chrysler 200, by the way) back to Enterprise, picked up Ramsey, decided we were too tired to leave the next day for Missoula, Montana, asked the office to extend our stay in Clarkston, and then opened up the wine cabinet to start a well-earned rest.
Thursday was a nothing day. We deserved it.
Friday was a travel day---228 miles---starting in Washington, going through the beautiful Clearwater National Forest
in the Idaho panhandle, ending at Jim & Mary’s RV Park in Missoula. (At a population of 67,000, Missoula is the second largest Montana city; Billings is the largest with more than 116,000). It was an easy drive. And the weather has broken---here at least. It’s in the low 80s. What a pleasant change.
We are in a nice site in a nice park.
We’ve been here twice before. We’re scheduled here for only two days. In fact, we are scheduled to spend only two days in all but one of the next thirteen parks. Whew!
On Saturday, we both had pedicures (Becky also had a manicure, but I have masculinity standards) and we toured the center (old section) of Missoula and the campus of the University of Montana---nickname: The Grizzlies, an NCAA Division 1 school and a member of the Big Sky conference. Nice place.
Tomorrow, we head for Deer Lodge, which is between here and Helena.
Our first stop on Sunday was the scale at the nearby truck stop. We had been told we should have our trailer weighed, so we can have intelligent conversations about axles and tires in the future. For the record, the trailer weighed 16,920 pounds.
The 91-mile trip to Deer Lodge (Population: 3,500) was a piece of cake. This is truly Big Sky country. The scenery was beautiful. We are staying at the local KOA campground, which is unlike any KOA we've stayed at before. The people are very nice, as usual, but the place is a dump. We decided to stay only one night, then stop at an RV park in Helena for one night.
The big attraction here is the Montana State Prison Museum, on the site of the old prison. (The new one is here also, but we wouldn't want to visit it.) The old prison is interesting to tour. I'm certainly glad to not have been an inmate there. According to the tour guide, the prison had a 100-year history of being an awful facility.
Connected to the old prison is the most fabulous car collection I have ever seen. It's just amazing. There are more than 150 cars there, going back to the very beginning. All of them are in magnificent condition. The place is well worth going out of your way to see.
We drove around town a bit, and took Ramsey for several walks. Now that I've seen more of this burg, I take back what I said about our RV park. Compared to the rest of Deer Lodge, this place is a Ritz-Carlton.
Monday took us to Helena, a 64-mile trip that was very easy. We are staying at the Lincoln Road RV Park, a very nice place. Becky called Steve Polhemus, a former buddy from her Pacific Coast Banking School days in the early '80s. He now lives in Helena and works for First Interstate Bank. He met us for a delicious lunch at the Jade Garden restaurant.
This was the first time I'd met Steve. Nice guy. Tall.
After lunch, we drove around Helena, took a look at the impressive capitol building, and then settled in for a rainy afternoon.
Tuesday involved an easy 81-mile trip on I-15, ending up in Great Falls, Montana. We are staying at Dick's RV Park (the owners' last name is Dick), a nice, older park close to town. The principal feature of this city is the Missouri River (yeah, that one) that dominates the place.
Tuesday night we had a lot of rain. Wednesday morning was glorious. We decided to set out on a bike ride along the river.
Everything went swimmingly until I had a flat tire in my rear wheel. Being a Boy Scout, I was prepared, of course, and replaced the tube.
A half hour later, Becky had a blowout, also in her rear tire. That was enough to make us give up on bicycling for the day. We ended up with a new tire and a new odometer computer for Becky's bike, and returned to our RV to regroup---and have lunch.
Since we have been in and out of Lewis & Clark country several times in the past year, we decided it was time to learn something about their exploration (beyond what we learned a zillion years ago in grade school, which we have largely forgotten). Wednesday afternoon, we went to the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center operated here by the U. S. Forest Service.
It was wonderful. It has terrific displays and a very good half-hour video presentation (done by Ken Burns, for you National Park video fans).
This city is a little hard to get around in because the Missouri River and the Sun River cut in to several parts and there are not enough bridges across them. On top of that, a two-mile stretch of a very important street that leads to the interpretive center is closed for four days for repaving. We just happened to be here for two of those four days. Our RV park is seven miles from the center;
we had to go fourteen miles to get there.
When we first got here, by the way, we were told that the majestic waterfalls for which the place was named had been destroyed by the building of several nearby dams. That turned out to be supposedly untrue to a great extent. We learned too late that the remaining falls are only eleven miles down river from the city. We just need to come back someday.
Tomorrow, we return to Canada.
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