I was too lazy to blog while I was on vacation this past week, so I am going to try to compress the entire thing into one post. That’s efficient, right?
This isn’t our first trip to Montana this year. We went a few months ago for a fiber show, but we were invited to come back this fall by my husband’s parents, who thought it might be nice to have a vacation with the grandkids. They rented a little condo in Whitefish, a town in the Northwest part of the state, near Glacier National Park. They took the train, but we made the long drive from Western Washington, which proved to be much easier than last time – probably because we weren’t pulling a trailer full of wool.
I had originally planned a little excursion into Canada to go along with this trip, but the night before our departure I pulled out my passport and realized it had just expired. Doh! So we stayed entirely on the US side for this one.
Whitefish is a popular area for resorts/ tourism, but we were firmly in the offseason here. Too late for a lot of the summer fun, and too early for ski season. We did, however, enjoy some gorgeous weather and spectacular fall color.
We also got to take advantage of some very interesting and uncrowded restaurants. This one was particularly memorable…
One place I was very excited to visit was the Great Northern Brewing Company, as they had been clients of mine back in the dark ages when I still had a tech career. I had helped them run a webcam in their tasting room, and make a virtual brewery tour, but had never set foot in there myself. I have now!
Note the construction out front. The whole town was pretty much torn up with road construction, which made parking and getting around a bit of a challenge. I would love to go back to Whitefish, but I am seriously going to wait until this project is finished.
We took a few local hikes like this one. I thought we were very brave to go up something called “Lion Mountain” in an area known for cougars. Here’s Alex admiring the view with his Grandpa.
Of course we also visited Glacier National Park, but most of the “Going to the Sun’ road was closed for the winter, so we didn’t explore it too deeply.
We were pretty happy with what we saw, though.
Of course we couldn’t forget the tacky souvenir stops on the way home.
The drive home from whitefish was full of surprises – I started out in the wrong direction and ended up heading North instead of West out of Whitefish. I was almost at the Canadian border (with no passport, remember?) when I realized my mistake. I stopped and asked one of the locals for advice, and she pointed me in the direction of a lesser-known route to Idaho, and got me back on track. Turns out my little side trip didn’t cost us too much in time, but it definitely upped the adventure factor. The northern route was reeeeally remote. Not a car, not a house, not a single sign of human life for an hour as we wound our way through the Kootenai National Forest along Lake Kookanusa. It was almost surreal at the end to stumble across this enormous dam.
After the dam, we hooked back up with our intended route, and we were back on track until we got to Cle Elum Washington and saw that traffic on I-90 was at a dead stop. I didn’t have the patience to just sit and wait there with no idea what was going on, so I decided to cut North and come in on Route 2. This was probably a stupid idea because 1) It took forever. 2) I ended up driving through the mountains and over the pass in the fog and in the rain and in the dark. I should count myself lucky that there was no snow up there, but really all I needed when I was that tired was to be careening around mountain roads with horrible visibility at 60 miles an hour. Ugh. But we made it home in one piece and I can totally laugh about it now, so there’s that.
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