Saturday, 9 June 2012

9 June – Livingston to Polson


We woke up to a cloudy, showery day.  Well at least the wind had eased off a fair bit.  Ros checked up the internet on Road To The Sun (in The Glacier Nat. Park) condition and it is closed at the moment (due to rain and avalanches), so we will only be able to go up a little way from either end.  The Road To The Sun is supposed to be a spectacular route that takes you high up into the mountains etc.  Generally RVs are not allowed up there but we had intended to go up on the scooter.  We’ll see how we do when we get there (fingers crossed J).
We headed out on the I 90, heading West.  Basically we drove through a lot of rolling hills.  Very different scenery to Wyoming.

We saw a Harley Davidson shop in Belgrade (called Yellowstone Harley Davidson) and decided to stop for a leg stretch (and allow Steve to have a look and drool J).  It seems that even at this distance away a lot of shops/outlets etc try to cash in by using Yellowstone in their name, Interesting.
We carried on and crossed over Elk Pass at 6393 ft and guess what….. it was snowing.  Not heavy, but enough to slow us down a bit.  A sign of things to come eh!  We passed through more plains and saw a couple of quite long trains carrying coal etc.
The wind started to pick up and we found ourselves heading into wind or slightly off to the side again.  This caused the RV to suck a fair amount more fuel and we ended up stopping at a dodgy-looking place on Rocky Mountain Road (just off the I90). The place looked closed but there were cars parked out in front.  It appeared to be a bar/casino/fuel stop/ god-knows-what. They were advertising the Montana Testicle Festival (or Testy Festy), held annually since 1982…We have no idea what that was all about and we were too scared to ask….  

We noticed that the price for the fuel was sky-high at $5.00/gal (normally we’ve filled up on about $3.70/gal so this was HIGH).  But as we were needing fuel, Steve went into the bar to check it out.  Inside, the first thing Steve looked for was the EXIT LOL.  There were people playing eightball, a number of people were sitting at the bar drinking (one lady had a row of about a dozen empty shot glasses in front of her… impressive..) and the music was loud.  There were also about 4 dogs roaming around, two of which were fighting.  Steve asked about getting fuel and the barman said that if we could make it another 5 miles it would be about $1.25/gal cheaper.  Steve was keen to stay for a drink and a chat to get to know the locals, but Ros figured (probably wisely) we should move on.  We moved on the extra 5 miles and fuelled up & topped up the gas.  By the way, over here, petrol is gasoline or ”gas” and LPG or “gas” (to us) is propane (just a bit of trivia).
We forged on and finally called it a day at Polson (after about 302miles).  We camped up in a nice little RV park near Flathead Lake.

Sorry about the lack of pictures in this edition, but it was raining a lot & there wasn’t a real lot to photograph.  Hopefully we’ll inundate you in editions to comeJ.

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