Spokane, WA to Bozeman, MT
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We got on the road reasonably early (around 8:30). Not much activity around the RV park. I didn’t see anyone else, although we were visited by a few cats. One was sitting on the step and apparently wanted to come along with us. I don’t blame him for wanting to get out of there. Possibly he was the one who left the ‘gift’ yesterday.
Life cereal for breakfast. It has been some time since I’ve had cereal for breakfast, and it was a nice break. We made a brief stop across the highway for gas and Starbucks and hit the road. Before long we were in Idaho where the road became noticeably rougher and continued that way until Montana.
Despite predictions, the weather was beautiful. Sunny with puffy clouds again and maybe mid 60’s. We passed through Coeur d’ Alene and got a nice view of the lake, which is quite pretty. But no time to stop. We wanted to make it to Bozeman today. We had come this way on the Sequent sabbatical trip in 1994 and the place names (Wallace, Smelterville, Kellog), if not the scenery, looked familiar. A bit west of Missoula we skipped the turn to Flathead Lake that we had taken back then and continued on to Missoula.
We stopped for gas in Missoula, and I decided to clean the windshield which was covered in bugs that had the misfortune of being in our way. In the process of lifting the driver side wiper, it came off. It’s some kind of ‘easy on/easy off’ mechanism. Well, it’s certainly easy off. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to get it back on. Les had a go and couldn’t figure it out either. After about 15 minutes of (somewhat embarrassing) futzing with it and comparing to the other one, we figured it out and sanity was restored. But that’s it for windshield washing. At least with moving the wipers to do so. We are likely going to need them. The pictures out the windshield will just have to have bugs in them. (It’s difficult to take pictures out the side windows since trailers require large mirrors which get in the way.)
The drive was getting long and I got to wondering where I-90 (which we were on) ended up and I traced it through the road atlas, state by state, all the way to where it ends in Chicago. We’re not going quite that far, but it’s I-90 all the way to Bozeman.
We were crossing the Rockies or the northern vestiges of them, through three or four major mountain passes, and as a result got trapped many times behind very slow-moving trucks that then came screaming by us on the way down. We saw many RV storage and sale places. Literally hundreds and hundreds of RVs. There doesn’t seem to be sufficient population to support them all. Even if everyone has one. Do people have two, depending on where they’re going?
We saw a road sign warning of impending snow on Sunday (tomorrow). A bit of Internet research revealed there is a winter storm warning for the Bozeman area for Sunday night through Tuesday with the potential for 6-13 inches of snow! It sure doesn’t look like it, but we’ll see. We may have driven 900 miles to be snowed in. Luckily, we have indoor sleeping arrangements and plenty of food.
As we headed into Bozeman, we started checking for RV spots and once again it looks like everything is full. But after the ‘Deliverance’ experience yesterday, we realized that if all we’re going to do is park and not use (or have use of) any facilities, why pay for it? There’s a Walmart just off the interstate. I called to confirm they still allowed trailer parking and they do, so chalk one up for Walmart. We were one of at least 10 people who made the same decision.
We got settled in and as Les prepped for dinner he opened the cabinet with the plates and bowls in it, but apparently there had been quite a bit of jostling in the trailer on the bumpy roads in Idaho that day. The stack of small plates made a sudden and unexpected bid for freedom. Les caught a couple but the rest got past him. However, they didn’t get far on foot. They pretty much plunged to their deaths is what they did. We didn’t have a dustpan, so it took a bit of clever wrangling with the trailer manual and broom to clean up. But no one got any glass in their bare feet on the trip.
One benefit of the Walmart parking lot, as Marion pointed out, was we can go get ice cream for dessert, which we did, after Les cleverly heated up the leftover lasagna I brought by putting it on a vegetable steamer above some boiling water (since there’s no microwave and we haven’t bothered lighting the oven pilot light yet and didn’t want to bother). The only drawback of the Walmart parking lot was we managed to park right by a streetlight that shone in my window all night. I thought it was the moon at first, but it never moved. But heck, if you close your eyes, it’s dark, so no problem.
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