Day 119: Roadtrip from Great Falls to Glacier National Park

Glacier National Park, now almost devoid of glaciers

I'm having some problems with my camera battery, so instead of roadtrip photos, it's just more socio-political observations about Montana today. 

The O'Haire Motor Inn gave us a free newspaper every morning in which we can see Montana bragging that it has plenty of money in the bank, no shortfalls and is well placed to withstand the chaos that may ensue next week.  That's very laudable, but today it's sharing the front page with a possible explanation for why Montana has so much money.  A prisoner has taken the state to court protesting the demand that he write all his correspondence in English.  Since he is of Guatemalan origin, he has reasonably good cause to want to use another language.  The reason he can't is that the prison has run out of money and can't afford a translator to check that he is not plotting and scheming. They used to rely on voluntary translations from a guard who since retired. Hmmm....

We stopped for breakfast in a little village with the very English sounding name of Dutton.  We were surprised to discover: a playground with picnic tables and what look like reservable barbecue facilities, a sports field and a pool.  I've been complaining for weeks about the lack of public facilities in the US and I was very surprised to see all ths in such a small place.  Then, at the entrance to the playground I noticed the sign saying it was built using funds from the government's recovery scheme.  Look everyone!  Your tax dollars do work!  Here is a very nice thing that everyone can use.  Too bad there isn't more stuff like that.

All the same, as we were driving to Glacier National Park, Montana looked quite well off.  It's mostly empty, but the farms are pristine and orderly in a way that reminds me of the Dutch and Scandinavian countries.  Then, all of a sudden we passed through what seemed to be a shanty town with a pretty American flag flying over it.  And then another one, then fields with ramshackle cabins.  I was changing my mind about Montana, and I suppose the fact that I later realised the 'poverty line' coincides exactly with the Blackfeet Indian Reservation does not alter matters one jot.  It's a beautiful bit of landscape though.

We arrived at Glacier to find all the A campsites filled with Canadians on some bank holiday weekend we didn't know about.  We just managed to get in at Cut Bank campground.  There are no facilities or water here, but we like it anyway. Antonia is feeling homesick, maybe because it looks just like home.

Days 117 & 118: Great Falls, Montana

Mermaid at the Sip 'n Dip bar

 There is something strange about driving down the Interstate for seven hours trying to work on a laptop in the back of a campervan.  Time passed quickly, though trying to line up the mouse with the pixels was a headache.  There is also something peculiar about pulling in to a motor inn in the middle of an unknown town for two nights, intent on getting as much work done as possible.  The rooms in the O'Haire Motor Inn are so neutral, I can hardly think of a thing to say about them, except perhaps that they tend towards the old-fashioned kind of neutral.  O'Haire Motor Inn does have its touch of wild eccentricity though.  On one side of a wall is a small swimming pool room with views over a pawn shop and a motor repair shop.  It has a very industrial feel, as if it had been installed in an abandoned factory or warehouse.  Since that's the kind of environment of lots of postmodern art exhibits, that's what it reminded me of - a postmodern art installation.  It's a similarity that's exacerbated by the echoing acoustics.  The four or five large, hairy (or made-up, according to gender) and tatooed people sharing the pool with Antonia are either speaking a dialect of English I can't understand or playing at talking nonsense, and I can't tell which.

On the other side of the wall is the Sip 'n Dip bar filled with kitsch trinkets of various kinds, roofed over with bamboo like a Hawaiian beach bar, carpeted with something featuring multi-coloured bubbles and furnished like a Hopper painting.  It sells cheap martinis and very good desserts and is obviously popular with tourists and locals alike.  To get in, you have to show your identity to a heavily-built doorman even if you are clearly in your 40s like us, and get a paper bracelet just like in a hospital.  There are windows in the wall between the bar and the swimming pool, beneath water level, and every Tuesday to Saturday night a girl dressed as a mermaid comes and performs acrobatic swimming in front of the bar windows for an hour.  At 9pm a lady arrives to play the piano and sing racy songs.  She's been playng here since 196?.

Our second evening in Great Falls was more mundane.  I spent an hour in Barnes and Noble, enjoying looking at books and then we had dinner at Pizza Hut.  It is sort of impressive to think that no matter where you go in the US, you can have an experience like that.  I like hanging around Barnes and Noble and I was quite impressed with the range of viewpoints in the books on offer, even though there is something about this whole region of the country that I can't quite put my finger on.  It's like the feeling I get when I'm visiting my parent's village  It's perfectly nice and I don't mind spending time there, but...  I think monocultural is the term I'm looking for.  And I can't live with that.

OK, so we did make a little cultural discovery this evening, while reading the news on Mike's cell phone in Pizza Hut.  It's not often a newspaper article makes me reach for the dictionary but apparently when the House of Commons 'tables' a motion in London, it means they'll keep on hurling insults at each other until a solution appears.  When the Senate 'tables' a motion in Washington it means they are going to refrain from talking about it and go and have a drink in the hope it will have gone away by Tuesday.

Days 115 & 116: We're not quite on vacation

Teton Canyon

 This is really a working trip for all of us, but due to force of circumstance the last month hasn't been extremely conducive to getting work done.  We're spending our last two days in Driggs catching up a bit, just going on short walks and soaking in the hot tub in the evenings.  Antonia and I went to explore the Teton Valley Museum and saw lots of Laura Ingalls Wilder type stuff for real.  What we liked best were the quilts and the cattle branding signs.  People often made quilts by sewing a square each and then stitching all the squares together.  It's interesting to come back 100 years later and still be able to see their individual tastes and personalities in the quilts after they're all gone.

We also had to change our plans for the next couple of days.  We can't really afford the time to hang around Glacier National Park until the weekend and we can't all work in the campervan.  So we've booked a motel in Great Falls, Montana for 2 nights.  Why Great Falls?  Well, it's on the way to Glacier but the hotel prices aren't as high as they are near the park.  And I thought it might be interesting to see what a medium sized town looks like.  Other than that I don't know a thing about the place, so it will be an adventure...  We have to stay 2 nights so that Mike can get a full day's work in.

Day 114: Driggs, Bears and Huckleberries

Driggs is a town built around a cross-roads, but with houses scattered sparsely throughout the valley all around it.  For a place that's supposed to have a population of 1000 people, it has a lot of shops, but I think part of the reason is that there's a big seasonal influx.  Most of those scattered cabins are holiday homes or rented out, like ours.  A lot of the shops are for fun things like outdoor activities.

Driggs crossroads

When I went for a stroll around I found my first impression that people are pretty nice here was justified.  They also take things nice and slow.  There are places in the world where people just talk fast, but here it's the opposite.  In the bookshop, the lady broke off a conversation about bears to give me a gift pack containing some special offers and three sweets.  The local teenagers seem more concerned with vampires than bears judging by the whole shelf of vampire books on offer to them.  But in the cheese shop, the ladies broke off a conversation about bears to thank me profusely for buying cheese from them.  In the newspaper that came with our house the front page headline is about a local lady who was chased by a grizzly while riding her bike, more or less in a residential area.  Suddenly, everyone is remembering every bear story they ever knew!  Mike had told me to go to the sports shop to find out how much bear pepper spray costs.  It comes in an aerosol can with a holster for about $60, which seems like quite a lot.  It is a big year for bears around here.  There was one by the side of the road in the Tetons this weekend, and as usual, a traffic jam had formed around it and a whole crowd of people were slowly sneaking towards it with their cameras, but in a jittery sort of way, as if they were all ready to run back to their cars.

Rainbow irrigator

There is one big supermarket in Driggs which I was surprised to find stocked everything we could possibly imagine wanting, in organic and non-organic versions.  It's always kind of fun to go round the grocery stores in foreign places and see what they've got.  The big thing out here is huckleberries, which turn out to be the same as the French myrtilles.  I never knew that.  They make just about everything except tarts with them here, (even barbecue sauce) but they're expensive.  The only snag with the afternoon was having to pay for the shopping on my French card, then a phone call to the US credit card company to remind them that we are traveling!

Day 113: Perfect Sunday

What I like about the kind of travel where we stay in a house somewhere is that we can combine the best of ordinary life with the best of traveling.  We can do all those Sunday things like stay in bed very late, eat home-cooked pancakes and maple syrup for brunch and eventually wander off to some place close by for a little walk.  That's where the adventure comes in. 

First to the top

We drove up to the Targhee Ski Resort and Antonia formed a plan to climb the highest hill in the place and reward herself with a free ride down on the chair lift. The only problem was that we were going to have to make good time up the hill to catch the chair lift before it closed.  I suppose ski lifts and ski run signs all over the place is not everybody's idea of a wilderness, but coming from a ski area ourselves, it had a homely feel.  The trail was steep enough to raise my endorphin level (which seems unusual for an American trail) and the elevation was high enough to cause all of us to struggle intermittently.  We had plenty of time to notice how much Antonia is growing up.  Not only does she make plans for us, not only does she want to charge us 50c for foot rubs (a service previously offered for free), but she now climbs mountains faster than us as well!!  We earned our reward and the chairlift dropped us down opposite the Branding Iron cafe in the middle of a bike festival and a gig by a local band, the Jet Black Ninja Funkgrass Unit.  They are truly excellent so we really got lucky there. 

Bike dancing to the Jet Black Ninja Funkgrass Unit

After that we ended the day perfectly by getting home in good time to cook Sunday dinner, lounge around in the hot tub and watch James Bond movies.

Day 112: How (not) to plan a day hike

 The end of the road in the Tetons.  This is where we had to turn back...

I believe in planning, and right now we're experimenting with officially planning our days. So yesterday, we set off to do a 13 mile hike to Lake Solitude in the Grand Tetons but just failed to reach our goal due to lack of planning. Ooops!  Here's all the things we should have done. I could imagine they're obvious to everyone else, but just in case.

1. Figure out how long the hike will take, then pad this with the amount of time you want to spend eating lunch, taking photos or dipping your feet in rivers.  Actually, we did fine on this bit.  The hike was supposed to take 8 hours and it would have done.  Trouble is, we didn't have 8 hours.  Here's why:
2. Figure out how long it will take to get to the trailhead (and back again).  Don't just guess, use Google Maps or something similar.  Actually what went wrong yesterday is that Mike thought the hike was on our side of the Tetons so when I told him it would take more than an hour to get to the trailhead he treated that information, shall we say, lightly.  I knew where the trailhead was but I didn't know that he didn't know!  Not only did we set off late, but we ended up doing a few unplanned errands on the way.  Being an hour late made the difference between reaching and not reaching the lake.
3. Figure out any time constraints.  Yesterday we were using a shuttle boat which returned from the trailhead for the last time at 7pm.  That was a pretty absolute constraint that forced us to turn back before the end of the hike.  Even that put us back at the house later than I'm really comfortable with but I lived with it.  Time constraints can also occur in the middle of a hike.  For example, if we're climbing a mountain, I find it important for digestive and motivational reasons not to eat lunch before the top (especially for a child), but then again, having lunch at 4pm doesn't work either.
4. Figure out your leaving time (and expected return time). With all this information, it's easy to figure out what time you need to leave the house, so how could we be late?  Of course, when some people are not ready on time it goes down like a truckload of rotten potatoes with other people who gave up desirable activities the day before/got up early/worked late so they could make the leaving time.  So here is another important planning rule:
5. Get all your stuff ready in good time.  There is quite a lot of personal leeway here.  If you want to get up at 3am to make pasta salad, launder your hiking socks and pop down to the all night gas station to buy essential trail snacks, nobody can tell you not to.  They can tell you you need to be at the agreed start time and place, no excuses (bar genuine emergencies).  Similarly, if you intend to hike in a tee-shirt even if there's a blizzard, that's up to you. You're just responsible for not forgetting to bring things that are very likely to be needed and compromising everyone else's day, let alone safety, because of it.  So here's the last rule.  OK, so nobody in our house has gone to quite such extremes, so the above is literary license.
6. Know about local conditions. One thing we've researched around here is bear awareness.   We're just not used to having to deal with large mammals other than humans.  We are used to mountains, but yesterday we ended up hiking about a mile over more old snow pack than we would expect at this time of year in the Alps.  We weren't really equipped for that, although all the other conditions were so nice, it was no problem really. Antonia even had a spare pair of shoes with her (because her Dad insists she shouldn't hike in sandals, but she intends to do so anyway). But I do know of a lot of situations where lack of local awareness has killed people, so it's not really to be taken lightly.

Day 111: Rodeo in Idaho

The opening ceremonies

All over the place in the west, I've seen signs advertising rodeos.  There's a rodeo every Friday night just round the corner from our house, so Antonia and I decided to go and see what it's like.  Mike decided he wanted no part of it.  He should have come.  We found a place on the benches next to some people I would have sworn were tourists from the way they were dressed (i.e. not like cowboys).  It turned out they were from as far away as Idaho Falls (1 hour).  The woman was from the area and had dragged her husband along, much against his wishes.  He looked about as comfortable as a cat on a hot tin roof.  Mike and he could have commiserated together.  He kindly explained some of the events to me anyway, but he really wanted to make sure I knew that the people around here aren't quite the primitive rednecks he thought they were making themselves out to be by participating in rodeo!  He told me there is a lot of wealth and nuclear technology going on in Idaho to counteract the impression I was surely forming.  I tried to let him know that in the South of France where I grew up, we have no problem at all combining engineering expertise, bull games, and thinking ourselves reasonably sophisticated, but that idea seemed to be too far away from his own for him to even register it.

The kid riding here is about 12.  He did really well, but the calf caught him in the stomach with its hoof after he was down.  People do get knocked around in this sport.

Actually the rodeo games are not quite like our 'course libre' (where teams of men try to remove a ribbon from the bulls horns, for those who don't know).  For one thing, there is a lot more waiting around between the action.  Small town rodeos seem to be family events with lots of kids competing.  There's something for everyone and it seems a great way to bring people together.  The events go like this:

• All stand for the national anthem, a prayer and an injunction to remember the armed forces (I have started to realise that all this stuff is par for the course)!
• Running commentary throughout the events from a couple of guys in the crow's nest.  As soon as I got familiar enough with their accents to understand what they were saying, I discovered it consisted of some a pretty pathetic series of jokes and jibes which everyone ignored.
• The guys see if they can stay on a bull for 8 seconds without falling off
• The guys see how quickly they can lasso a calf
• The girls see how quick they can ride up to a goat, knock it over on its back and tie its ankles
• The guys lasso the calf, knock it over on its back and tie its ankles
• As above but a girl has to run to the calf, pull a ribbon from its tail and run back again
• The girls have various timed riding races like slaloming around poles or a triangular course around barrels
• All the kids get to go into the arena and chase a calf around (there's one thing we also do in France)
• The guys see how long they can stay on bucking horses, bare back or otherwise

A line up of prospective cowboys and cowgirls

There were a few other things after that, but we'd already stayed two hours and needed to get home to get up early for a hike the next day. We both had a fabulous time.  I had to lasso Antonia, throw her on her back and tie her ankles to get her away (just kidding!).

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Other sporting events in the USA

• My first ever baseball game in which the Phillies won of course!!
• The Philadelphia Flyers embarrass me by pretending they can play ice hockey, but OK, I'm including the experience anyway.

Basics of rodeo

• About.com has a Rodeo 101 section which should get us more clued up before we show up next time