June 23 - Drive to Great Falls, Montana

After awakening from the "train coming thru the trailer" dream, I really didn't want to go back to sleep because my mind seems to prefer to return to the most current dream when I do that. Monika couldn't sleep either, so we simply got up early, ate pancakes for breakfast, and packed up and left by about 7:30. That gave us a nice early start for a long day's drive, but at the price of having missed some sleep and both being a bit groggy. From Glasgow we continued to follow US 2 west, first along the Missouri and then along the Milk river, a tributary that runs all the way up into Canada. In fact, we were about as far North as you can go without a passport, and some of the signs for right turns off the highway simply said, "Canada". Altho I like to camp and travel in Canada, we planned to stay south of the border this time to avoid the customary disassembly of all my camping gear that the Canadian border folks have done on my last few visits. They always ask for the exact dates that I was in Canada and I can never remember it off the top of my head so I hem, haw, and stutter some approximation, upon which I get sent to the secondary search area and the car is disassembled.

Another reason to avoid crossing the border is to avoid the possibility of losing Monika on the way back. Altho that might sound like some version of the old joke that runs"Take my wife, please!", it really wasn't funny at the time. We had, as usual, gone camping for a couple of weeks in Ontario, I think it was, and had no problem crossing the border into Canada using our US drivers licenses and voter registration cards, as was customary at that time. But when we tried to get back into the US, the US Immigration people at the border heard her accent (what accent? I didn't hear any accent!) and demanded that we show either a passport or her naturalization papers, neither of which we had brought with. They were seriously going to keep her at the border until I could drive home to Virginia, retrieve the papers, and drive back to the border to pick her up. What a bother! As a result we are much more careful now and do, in fact, travel with our passports just in case.

We drove along the extensive river valleys of the Missouri and the Milk Rivers. These valleys cut into the grasslands and seemed to be places where the soil was more fertile and trees could grow, possibly due to the increased moisture. I saw crops that looked like hay, winter wheat, and potatoes, but I'm no farmer and wasn't too sure about what exactly was being grown. Between the river valleys we drove across a slightly rolling but basically flat grassland plateau. Most of that area was used for grazing. But the main contrast to crossing the US farther south is that this northern route was green and verdant all the way across instead of the stretches of arid desert that we drove across in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico on our last traverse of the country (see Wanderung 3).

Obviously one grassland pasture looks pretty much like another, so on those stretches we entertained ourselves by listening to the local (and only) radio station. The section of the news quoting the commodities prices from the Chicago board of trade brought back memories of our time in central Illinois farming country when those prices had always been critical for the majority of the listeners who were farmers. But this station went a big step farther in reporting the exact prices of each local cow sold at a local cattle auction, I gathered. I mean they mentioned the name of the cow's owner, the cow's weight, its selling price, and even its color! The only thing missing was the cow's name and age and you would have a capsule bovine biography. The station was also breaking in a new newscaster who sounded like she was still in High School, but the older woman running the show, after telling the listeners about that, admonished them to "Be Nice!" to the fledgling. After she read the weather report with only a few stumbles, the woman told all of us out in radio land that the young girl was "shaking like a leaf", which no doubt mortified her. Anyway, we did enjoy the station and the country and western mix they played for music wasn't too bad so we kept it on a while during the drive.

After lunch we turned to the southwest to head for Great Falls, Montana, on US 87 and started passing little clumps of mountains jutting up out of the plains, starting with the Bears Claw Mountains. This reminded me of our encounter with the Big Horn Mountains on the plains before the Rocky Mountains around Yellowstone last year (see Wanderung 3), but these patches of mountains were nowhere near as extensive or high as the Big Horns. Still, it gave the eye something to lean on, as my sister Phyllis would phrase it, and made the scenery more interesting.

We found our way to the campground in the middle of the city of Great Falls about 1:30 p.m., set up the trailer, and promptly fell in bed for a nap. Somehow watching the "different but yet the same" scenery roll by while driving for 6 hours was highly soporific, not to say stultifying. We were re-energized after the nap enough to drive in to sign up for the Great Falls Volksmarch (but not enough to actually walk it yet!) and visit the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center that was located just to the east of town right on the banks of the Missouri River.

We arrived around 5 p.m. and so we only had an hour before it closed at 6, but we decided to try to see it anyway. We found out that it was not nearly enough time to really read and absorb all the museum's exhibits. The lower floor of the museum is a very well done timeline of their trip complete with some cultural background on each of the major tribes they met on the way. It was really well done and you shouldn't miss it if you get in the area; just remember to allow at least a couple of hours if you're seriously trying to learn about their journey.

The significance of the Great Falls area in this saga is not just that Lewis was the first white man to see the Great Falls, but that he also discovered a set of 5 different falls covering several miles of the Missouri River. This extensive series of falls forced a long, grueling portage where they dragged their boats across the hills around the falls on crudely fashioned wagons, and that lasted over a month rather than the day or two they had counted on to portage past the falls. If you stand there and look at the river bluffs and ravines that they had to traverse, you really wonder how they ever did it at all. No kidding, those guys were some tough cookies to do that job.

They did manage it, of course, but the long delay set them up for crossing the Bitterroot Mountain Range just as winter was beginning, and that in turn lead to starvation and exhaustion before they reached the other side. To stave off starvation they not only ate shoe leather, but also three of the younger horses! In the journals Lewis reported that he rather liked the taste of horsemeat while Clark just never got used to it. But you do what you have to do when you're starving, and everybody did make it to the other side alive, if barely. Can you imagine Sacagewea and her infant going thru all of this? Compared to these people, I really felt like a wimp.

After being thrown out of the museum at closing time, we hit Wal Mart on the way back for a coaxial cable for our computer cum TV setup and to try to find cheap milk. Stores in North Dakota and Wyoming were charging $4.00 a gallon for milk when we were passing thru, which I felt was just outrageous, and I had read somewhere that Wal Mart was trying to hold the line on prices of basic commodities such as milk and bread. In so many of these towns there is only one grocery store so they can get away with this price gouging but we had switched over to using our dried milk, and that worked quite nicely. We simply bided our time until we could find a Wal Mart to see if we could get fresh milk cheaply. As it turned out, we found really good bread at $1 a loaf and 1% milk at $2.48, which is just a little more than what we were used to paying rather than twice as much. Returning to our campground we tried out the cable and first tried the old movies channels, but we had already seen them. Next we tried the Comedy Central channel, which we don't get at home, and it was surprisingly funny. The thunderstorms that had been passing us by to the west all afternoon finally drifted our way and pelted us with rain as I completed the journal for the day and Monika continued crocheting a table centerpiece. She was holding the time spent crocheting down to only an hour per day to avoid aggravating her carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms, so the centerpiece became a labor of love stretched over many evenings.

As the front approached us, the trailer started to shake around a bit in the roughly 40 mph wind gusts from the downdrafts in front of the storm. Compared to a small airplane in severe turbulence the motion was quite minor, so I wasn't worried, but compared to a normal house that doesn't move at all, the wind shook us quite a bit and Monika was rather concerned. But things quieted down when it started to rain, and we hopped into bed to finish the Elizabeth Peters book. It was a good thing we started early because the last chapters were so gripping that we literally couldn't put it down and stayed up to 11 to finish it before turning in for the night.