Idaho and Beyond...

We left Portland at 8am on July 15th. The night of the 14th was a teary (for me anyway) goodbye to the guys. We had a nice day/night spent with them. I never thought I’d experience separation anxiety, but there I was, giving them hugs and not wanting to let go. Ok, enough of that, or I’ll cry again….geez…I’m getting soft in my old age.

It’s now July 27th and we are in Pennsylvania and it’s been such a wild ride that I’ll have to split this up into several posts to cover everything between my last post and now.

We were wheels up and on the road at 8am. The drive east through the Columbia River Gorge was INCREDIBLE!! We didn’t stop to take pictures because we’d never get anywhere if we did, but it was amazing. (I think I’m going to have to start looking in the thesaurus for new words to describe all the things we are going to see.)

Originally the plan was to stay in Coeur d’Alene for a couple of overnights before heading to Montana. Last year when we went to Yellowstone we drove through Coeur d’Alene and I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was, so we planned to stay for a bit. We got to the RV Park and were really disappointed. The park wasn’t what we thought it was going to be, there was a mill directly across the river that wasn’t on their website that was an eye-sore and noisy. We were on a river, but not the lake and it just wasn’t what I thought it would be. Frustration at all that was compounded by not being able to get our dish to work…come to find out we probably have a broken receiver and they have to send out a tech…while we are on the road….. The park was really nice about refunding all but one night of our stay (because we set up and had been there all afternoon, and it’s peak season, they had to charge us for a night), so we packed up and hit the road again at about 8-8:30pm and drove on. Of course, as we left we drove through the part that I remember being amazed at last year. The plus is we saw some campground/RV places on the way out that we may be able to stay at in a year or so when we are back on this side of the country.

The drive through Northern Idaho just at sunset was really nice, and then it was pitch black. I tried to stay awake for most of it, but ended up dozing off once we hit Montana and dozed on and off between the cities and gas stops. I was asleep when we hit Missoula and Bill said that I missed about an hour of the most amazing lightening show I’ve ever seen. Once I woke up and I stayed awake to see it. It was really pretty. There was no thunder that I could hear to accompany it; there were just flashes and streaks about every 15-30 seconds. We arrived in Bozeman about 4:30 in the morning (mountain time) and parked in a Wal-Mart parking lot and hit the sack, slept until about 10am, got up…brushed our teeth, waddled into Wal-Mart for donuts and juice, and hit the road again. In Bozeman I called the place we were supposed to be on Monday and they didn’t have room for us early, so we called some other places and found a spot at Yellowstone’s Edge RV…what a beautiful place. This was the view from our RV in the park, and they had an all you can eat, ice cream social on Sunday night….bonus!! The ice cream was SO good. I had Montana Moose Moss, Stuck in a Rut, and Huckleberry…mmmm…mmmm…..good! Catch the next post for our week in Gardiner, MT and Yellowstone National Park.

hugs~
;-)Kari