Day Twelve

Blog update! Turns out we had capacity issues on Picassa so our older posts have lost their photos. We have rectified the situation and will be reloading all photos at our earliest opportunity. Kudos to Peter for figuring this one out (along with everything else)!

Now for the new news:
We put a lot of miles behind us today, but managed to have fun and find a few interesting things to do along the way. The Missoula KOA was weird, as noted earlier, and the woman in the tent next to ours (we'll call her Whiney Wanda One-Volume) woke up at 4:30 when it started sprinkling (as did we) and began whining to her husband about the rain, etc in her outside voice. She could have been in our tent. We decided to pack up before the rain got heavy and put that campsite behind us.

We stopped for breakfast at the Coffee Cup Cafe in Hamilton, MT, for breakfast at the bar with the locals. Good food to get us going. Pete really wanted to get in one more fishing hole before we left Montana and we found the Wally Crawford access to the Bitterroot River outside Darby. I was happy to skip the fishing this time and restore order to our road-home, including getting off the layer of dust we picked up inside and out climbing the mountain to Garnet. I loved this old school house that was near the river.

Looking for a grocery store to get lunch, we stopped in Chellis, a strange little town that was apparently begun by farmers who have since departed. It seemed part ghost town with its empty, boarded up old-west-style buildings, but we found a cute little store where we picked up some mementos. The grocery store was on the way out of town so we stopped there, saw the only other car with a Maine plate for days (hey, maybe we knew them!), got our picnic lunch and got back on the road.

One more pit stop and we soon arrived at something completely different: Craters of the Moon National Monument. Acres of lava fields, old cones and ash, which pioneers actually tried to navigate years ago. This was both Peter's and my first climb up an old volcano. All in all, a bizarre and fun experience. This is me walking on the top of the tallest (defunct) spout.

A lone tree that was hanging on in the crazy wind at the top...it felt like you could get blown off of there.

That's Pete up there, taken from the bottom--and he's actually only about halfway up.

On our way to our night stop in Elko, Nevada, we passed over the bridge over the Snake River where Evel Knievel did his crazy and unsuccessful jump in a rocket-car. It's beautiful and very deep!

I just got a kick out of this.

Time for dinner and a good night's sleep, Hope to hit my brother's house in California by late tomorrow afternoon!