Hi friends. Did you know that Montana is large? We drove like 720 miles worth of Montana yesterday. In east coast terms thats like driving from Boston to Raleigh. And it was just Montana. Doesn't even take into account the 130 miles of South Dakota we hit. It was hard.
We woke up for the sunrise so we could run out to Mt. Rushmore before we left, because patriotism.
contemplating democracy
Then we took a quick pit stop in Deadwood, because again, the bachelor, but also deadwood, but either way it just turned out to be another tourist trap. We got some coffee from a lady who judged me for wanting caramel and sugar in my iced coffee (if that horrifies her she would not be impressed with my dunkin order just sayin) and Dylan gambled a little because holy moly South Dakota loves casinos.
didnt realize wild west road construction looked like that
dylan: not great at slots
artist rendering of night drive through flathead. plus rain, deer, and forest fires. and rapists. and raccoons.
Then we drove for many hours. I took the night shift, which was four hours through the pitch black Flathead national forest in the pouring rain. We were also listening to this podcast about the East Area Rapist, which was like 8+ hours of incredibly well researched content, but was also completely horrifying. It was not a fun drive.
After about 18 hours on the road and almost breaking into our Airbnb's neighbor's house we finally made it and crashed in hopes of waking up to Glacier the next morning.
Jokes on me guys. Apparently the apocalypse has begun and it set its sights right on Glacier to start. We had today planned to leave Kalispell early on, drive from the west to the east through Glacier, then head up to Banff tonight. However, nature had its own catastrophic plans that included raging forest fires closing roads in the west and 6 inches of snow closing roads in the east. I'm no weather doctor but it feels like those should probably cancel out at some point and leave us with an awesome day but they sure didn't. So glacier was canceled.
We got about a football field beyond the park boundary before we were bombarded with park rangers and road closure signs before we realized that there was nowhere to go. We did however manage to walk up to the tip of lake mcdonald and take a small handful of photos. It's been cold and rainy here so visibility was pretty bad, but I think it still made for some nice photos. I'll throw up albums of everything later I PROMISE.
G officially loves Dylan more than he loves me, just an update
a good boy who is clearly very tired of us making him drive across the country
We wound up driving up through Radium, Yoho and Banff into Canmore earlier than planned tonight though, which was a nice surprise. We're gonna run out for dinner now and chill out for a much needed relaxing night after yesterday's drive.