Tuesday, 8/24/04

We’ve been traveling way too fast for us. Highway 12 was not conducive for extensive boondocking and we only noted one campground the entire length in which we might have fit and that was just a little west of the Lolo Pass in Jerry Johnson. It rained really hard all day Monday regardless, so we pressed onward into and through Lolo and then Missoula. To be noted however, is that the scenery continued to get better as we gained elevation and it definitely is a drive worthwhile taking in our opinion. I’d hate to do it in an RV in one day since it’s over 200 miles of curvy, river hugging, narrow canyon highway. There’s a nice rest area at the top of Lolo Pass and here’s the view we had through the rain laden clouds.

We’re up early this morning with the Saturn detached hoping to explore the eight mile road towards Lake Mary Ronan to see if anything suitable presents itself. Last evening we parked in a paved scenic overlook just up from the Big Arm of Flathead Lake. It was noisy—Hwy. 93 is the only highway to a lot of the popular towns around here and it’s jammed packed and busy all night long with truck traffic. The trip north from Missoula however, also gets more scenic with each passing mile, with the small towns of Ronan and Polson in a fabulous setting of the green Mission Valley surrounded by towering mountains. Alas, no pictures of that. If we can get parked somewhere we hope to explore much more fully by car.

Later:

With continuing rain we decided to skip Lake Mary Ronan (sorry Lee!) not knowing if we would fit or not and just push on towards Glacier. We stopped at the WalMart in Kalispell to reconnoiter the area for a suitable RV park and found none. Many looked like the final resting place for old trailers and RVs and the one that was at all decent had one spot which was vacating today which they thought might hold us. Nope. Why RV parks find it necessary to have a bunch of little decorative sapling trees planted all over the place when today’s large RVs need maneuvering room is beyond us. We passed, not wanting to chance dinging up the rig. So be forewarned if you’re headed to Kalispell in a big rig, your option might just be the local WalMart. However, just down the road we found an old closed bowling alley with a huge parking lot and asked some workers if they knew if we could stay. The workers are remodeling the building for a new owner and said sure, it wouldn’t be a problem.

So, our immediate problem is taken care of. Marc is attempting to dial in the satellite in the rain and if he’s successful you should see a posting of our trip pages so far later today. He’s having problems as we seem to be at the edge of our satellite’s footprint so we may have to wait.

We’ve been told that the Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier has suffered a rock slide and it may be days until it opens up anyway. We don’t want to pay to enter the park until the weather improves and the highway is fixed. With a secure place to park here however we can explore further afield in the Saturn and find something more suitable.