Montana or Bust

On Friday June 16^th I woke up long before dawn and set out to DC to retrieve my missing Lacroixs.  My flight was out of Kalispell at 6 am, so I left Canoe Gulch at around 3 am, drove very, very slowly down the back roads that constituted a “shortcut” and made it to the airport around 4:30.  I couldn’t figure out where exactly to leave my rental car (which as it turns out meant that they didn’t realize I had returned it until a week later when I called them) but did find the place to drop my keys. Past all of the signs that warn travelers against having bear spray in their bags, a backpack alone on my back, I got on the plane back to DC.

About 8 hours later I stepped off the plane to what felt like a foreign (and very humid) land that was/is home.  I made it back to the house and got straight to work… Patrick was wrapping up his week and the girls weren’t even home (playing instead at their Aunt’s house) …. The goal was the whole house packed and out the door the next morning, so In a nice summer rain I put the rack on the top of the car and packed up the last of the girls clothes (most of the stuff I had packed before I left for Montana… thankfully).

The next morning we burritoed the package for the top of the car, tucked in the last bits of things we figured we would need (a tablecloth here, a box of crafts there, oh wait there is a little room, lets add some dog food…. You get the idea) and managed to hit the road around 11:30 am…. Just in time for lunch 3 blocks away at subway.  While eating lunch we realized we had forgotten everyone’s passports, so after lunch we ran back home and grabbed them. Now 12:30 we were on the road to Indiana!

I bought the girls car presents during my layover in Denver the day before, so each day they had one new thing to occupy them on the 8 (or more) hour drive. These presents were not always the most entertaining (aka only occupied them for 10 minutes in some cases) but they were always appreciated and the anticipation of a new present each day kept them going for sure! The first night we rolled into a town about an hour from our hotel at about 8 pm and stopped for dinner. We had a great Italian food dinner on a porch that we could even have our pooches with us.  We were much amused at the car that we parked next to, which had a bumper sticker that read “Eat Leaf, Not Beef” a fine juxtaposition to our “Eat Beef – The West Wasn’t Won on Salad”  We rolled into our hotel around 10 pm, watched a little HGTV and hit the hay.

The next morning the kids (well really Izzy) really wanted to swim, so we packed up and then let Izzy swim for a bit. On the road by 10:30 or so, we felt like we were doing pretty darn well.  The goal for the second day was a trip down memory lane at Beloit College and then staying the night with my college friend Lara in Eau Claire. When we reached Beloit we had lunch at a super cute little market (that was definitely not there when we went to school)  and then took the girls and dogs for a walk around the campus. We showed them middle college and, most importantly, where Patrick and I met at OEC. Evie took a few photos of us there…

I think they were largely unimpressed with the college tour (more interesting was the playground near campus). But I did make sure to take them both into the new science building, which I think is pretty much the coolest change to the school since I was there.

Back in the car, we drove another 4ish hours and showed up later than we had planned, but not ridiculously late, to Lara’s house, which was beyond Eau Claire in Menomonie. (For the whole rest of the trip we couldn’t say the name of the town without also singing “do-do-dat-do-dut” like in the old Muppets song.) At her house the girls played with her twin girls who were just a year younger than Isadora while the adults ate a delicious homemade dinner. I had thrown a bracelet making kit (one of Izzy’s b-day presents from her DC party) into the car, so after dinner the girls all got together and made bracelets. Lara very sweetly had arragned for her kids to stay at their grandma’s down the road for the night so there would be enough space for us all to sleep, so after a few hours of fun the twins took off for bed at g-mas.  Patrick, Lara’s husband,  Lara and I stayed up for another few hours just chatting.  It is amazing how so much time can go by but  friends are still friends and it feels like no time has past.

The next morning we got going around 9ish (hurrah!!) and said goodbye to Lara and Wisconsin.  The third day of travels was mostly a long slog across Minnesota and North Dakota.  The hotel that night, however, made up for the long hours in the car… it had an indoor pool with a big slide, splash pad and other fun pool goodness (which I cannot believe I didn’t take any pictures of… sigh).  That night we looked it up and discovered that the going to the sun road through Glacier National Park still was not open, so we would have to change our room

The next morning we continued west.  I convinced Patrick, by looking up the coverage map for Verizon, that it would be fine to hit the road and have him make an important conference call while in transit…. So down the road we go, me rather proud of the fact we are finally on the road before 9 am and Patrick looking nervously ahead as what little remnants of civilization were left slowly faded into the honest-to-goodness west. It was round about the middle of driving through the Teddy Roosevelt National Park (an amazingly beautiful grassland by the way) when Patrick needed to get on his call. He made the call, which connected at first, and then immediately disconnected. As he dialed, spoke, got cut off and redialed, I tried to pull over to a place with reception and then the call would get dropped and then we would wash, rinse, and repeat….  I felt so bad!  Finally after about 15 minutes of this fiasco we made it to a truck stop with reliable cell coverage.  Patrick had a limited amount of this person’s time and that limited time was all but expended.  He called once more and no one answered.  We got gas and were about to be on our way when (thankfully!) the person called back and Patrick was able to talk to him for about an hour.  So what I gained by leaving early ended up being our kids “playing” at a truck stop instead of a water park… :P

Pretty soon after the truck stop fiasco we made it into Montana. It felt super good to be almost “there” even though at that point we had more than 12 hours to go. (Montana is a really big state!) The plan for that night was to stay at a glamping (glamour camping) spot that I found online and reserved the night before. The instructions on the reservation said that there were no keys and that we should call to arrange our arrival.  So round about 5 hours from the place I gave a call, only to learn that the owner had not received our reservation (an apparently common problem) but luckily still had a tent left for us. We rolled into the ranch where the tents were (just outside of Helena) a few hours before sunset and on a next to empty tank of gas…. Which strangely for us was a theme this trip as well.  We somewhere down the line in the last year(ish) of living in lands of many gas stations had forgotten the age old western rule of always fill at a quarter of a tank.  This lack of gas was particularly problematic though because we were at least 30 miles from gas on a tank that probably had about 29 miles left.  Fortunately we were saved by a nearby marina that was supposed to be closed already for the night but was still open because they had a huge crowed camped there.  The gas was silly expensive, but we just didn’t care at that point. 

After gasing up the car we went across the street to the Dam Bar (bar at a dam, so clever) and had a nice dinner. We then went back to our fancy tent and enjoyed being in the West, putting out feet in a stream, and playing some music.  The next morning we woke up early enough (I was no longer stressed about when we got going… seeing how that went terribly wrong for me the day before… and headed over nearly other-carless roads up into the northwestern corner of Montana and, after about five hours, our home for the summer – Libby!