In case you haven’t guessed it yet, the Kootenai National
Forest and the towns therein are a pretty unique place. This uniqueness was on
full display in our week(end) here last week. I worked a flex schedule last
week so I could watch the kids on Friday while Patrick worked and just so I
could have one more day of adventuring out here. We started Friday as most
Lacroix Libby days start, at Aunt T’s coffee house. I took full advantage of
the internet and posted a bunch of blogs, helped the girls with a little bit of
summer homework, and ordered all of the school supplies for the girls (to be
shipped to Kensington via Vivian). Once we’d taken care of these necessities I
drove Evie and Izzy over to Ross Creek Cedars, a place many folks had told me
we had to go while we were here.
Ross Creek did not disappoint. It was a short little walk among the most
amazing cedar and hemlock trees. The girls found an old cedar that was totally
hollow and played in if for quite awhile:
We then played on a set of fallen twin cedars and found a strange area where lots of people had
made cairns in the streambed. The girls really wanted to contribute to this
effort, so we stopped and we all spent some time building a cairn. In retrospect, perhaps the most amazing thing
about the cairns is that no one has come along and maliciously (or clumsily)
knocked them down.
After climbing on and around many a cedar we headed back
into town because it was the “big” night in Libby… apparently the biggest night
of the year in town…
Ignite the Nights, Friday night cruising and burning out
along Mineral Ave, aka Main Street, aka “The Gut”. We were in desperate need of clean laundry,
so just before the festivities began I ran down to the laundry mat and started
no less than 8 loads of laundry, drank a beer, moved everything to the dryer,
drove back home to let the dogs out, got the laundry out of the dryer and then
headed over to the brewery. Patrick, the girls and the whole crew of Libby
folks we’ve been hanging out with were sitting outside listening to the squeal
of tires and taking in the scene.
We hung out for a few hours and then walked the Gut and
treated the girls with cotton candy as a reward for their tolerance of the
noise and stench of the cars.
The next morning we went back into town for the car show,
which was still pretty awesome but also much more the sort of thing that we
were used to. There were hundreds of predominately American old cars lining the
road. We had promised the girls that we wouldn’t stay for too long because they
had a talent show that they had been working on with the neighbor kids for
pretty much the whole summer scheduled for that evening that they wanted to get
ready for.
After almost three hours of prep and dress rehearsal The
Eagle City talent show was ready to roll. The kids set up a ticket booth at the
entrance to our neighbor’s house. Admission was $2 for adults and $1 for kids,
with all proceeds benefiting the local animal shelter. They had even put together programs for
all attendees. We stalled the show for a bit because there
were a few more of our neighbor’s friends who were coming out for the show (and
bbq afterwards). When they arrived though Evie set about starting the show with
her well rehearsed (and totally written out) script as the MC.
The first act was our neighbor’s son, who hit
a baseball. For the second act Izzy came out with her kitty cat piano and
played a song she’d been working on from her piano lessons.
Izzy then stayed
onstage for a dance routine with the neighbor’s daughter to Roar. Other acts included more dancing and
acrobatics. It all went over very well and was super cute. After the big performance we had a great
backyard picnic, complete with huckleberry cobbler and ice cream (both homemade
and utterly delicious!)
On Sunday I woke up early to take Patrick down to Mac’s for
his day-long Kootenai fishing adventure.
The kids and I hung out for most of the day doing crafts and reading
books and then headed down to Libby around 3 pm to go pick up Patrick and see
Cars 3, which was playing at the Dome theater in town. When we went to the pullout in town, however,
Patrick was no where to be seen, and the movie started in about 10 minutes, so
we decided to put into place plan B (aka I go to the movie with the kids and
Patrick walks over to the brewery when he gets off the river). The movie was
super cute, and fun because the theater reminded me of the Loft back home. Our tickets were discounted because Evie won
a raffle from the summer reading program at the library. About ¾ of the way
through the movie I received a text from Patrick saying he was still on the
river… after the movie around 6 pm, he finally made it back to
civilization. He had two more fish to
add to our freezer collection and what sounded like a wonderful day!
The weekend fun continued into the week, on Monday night Patrick and I had a date night to go see Macbeth via Montana Shakespeare in the Parks. It was our second time seeing it in about 4 months and it was really cool to see a different interpretation of it!
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