The long and winding road...

See this sign? This was the story of our journey from Whitefish, MT to Grangeville, ID today.

Up bright and early, we thought we had it made as we pulled out of Whitefish sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m. The trip south around Flathead Lake was uneventful -- except for Gerry deciding that area would be a great place to HAVE A BOAT! Yes, Gerry wants a boat. However, in order to bring the boat with us, we'd need to leave the Civic behind. If we hauled a boat behind the motorhome, we'd have no way of getting it to the boat launches. For that matter, other than packing up every time we wanted to go somewhere outside the campground, we'd have no way of getting anywhere!

Okay, enough about the boat and how much fun it would be on Flathead Lake. Did I mention how gorgeous it it? And how big it is? Alright, enough about the boat!!!!!

We ran into some construction between Polson and Missoula that slowed us up a bit. There was a good 30 miles or so of road rebuilding happening, and a max speed of about 35 mph (maybe 55 km/h?). The sign at the end of the project said federal funding was over $28 million, and state funding was $0.4 million. If I'm not mistaken, we witnessed federal stimulus money at work -- and there were sure a lot of people working!

We got into Missoula, the biggest town or city we've seen since we left Calgary, around 2'ish. After filling up the motorhome, we found a Walmart on the south end of the city, on the 'right' side of the road, so we pulled in and picked up a few things for the motorhome -- storage bins, a new waterhose -- stuff like that. We got out of Missoula about 2:30, somewhat later than we'd originally thought. Ger had figured the entire trip would be about 5 1/2 hours. See that sign up above? Yeah...

It was an absolutely stunning drive (and when I'm on a better 'net connection, I'll get my pics uploaded to Flickr for all to see) -- streams that eventually turned into small, clear, rushing rivers, complete with rapids. A raft and someone to pick us up at the end would have been absolutely heavenly today, as the temps got into the high 20's (celsius). The skinny two-lane highway (MT/ID Hwy 13) wound alongside the stream/river along the base of the mountains. While not mountains in the sense of the Rockies that we're use to seeing in Banff, they were mountains nonetheless, and the road didn't go through them or over them; it went around them -- all.

When we got to Kooskia, ID, we thought we were out of the worst of it. Yeah, right! About 15 minutes south of Kooskia, we jogged right...and up. And up some more. Ger said he felt like Icarus flying to the sun. We just never quit going up! And the the neverending winding road!

We did eventually get to the top of the hill, and then went back down the other side. The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain... Some more winding road, some more up the hill, and we came out on what appears to be some sort of a plateau where the town of Grangeville sits. The Bear Den RV Park is just south of the town, just off Hwy 95. That's good, as tomorrow we head for Caldwell, ID, just west of Boise for the next two nights. And that's south of here.

The clock read 7:30 when we pulled in. The barbecue is on and the hotdogs are ready to be grilled. It's now 8:30 p.m. and we're both tired and hungry. The AC is on, the sun is shining, and we'll be up bright and early again to be on our way.