Early Sunday
morning, 23AUG, we said our sad goodbyes to Ed & Elaine, & started the
long drive back to the USA. During the
drive we encountered not the worst winds we have driven the RV in, but we haven’t
seen them this bad in years. Again to
bypass the heavy oil field traffic around Williston, ND, we stayed in Canada
& crossed back into the USA at a small border crossing. Once again USA Customs wanted to know why we
were crossing border there? Like we must
have some criminal reason?
During our short drive
in North Dakota, we could see the once booming oil field is now pretty quiet –
empty camps, very little semi traffic, etc.
We stayed at a RV park in Glendive, MT.
Unfortunately their websites does not reflect reality! Turns out the RV park was sold to a hotel
chain four years ago & closed. The
hotel was built & the chain decided to reopen the RV park on the remaining
land this year. Apparently the chain
decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to create a new website for the RV park
& just reposted info from four years ago.
So we were expecting a pool, internet, & cable TV – NOT!!!
Early Monday morning
it was back on the road heading west to WA state. The smoke from WA, OR & CA fires was
blanketing Montana. After setting up
camp in Bozeman, MT, we had a short walkabout of downtown. We noted that Bozeman has some pretty
exclusive & pricey stores on their main street; turns out Bozeman is the 19th
most affluent small town in USA – it shows.
Then it was off to
Susan & Brian Troth’s for a visit & excellent dinner. You may remember that Dan reconnected with
Brian last year & we had short visit with them, before seeing Brian at the
Coast Guard Academy fortieth reunion (see following BLOG link for details of
that visit). We all agreed that next
visit we need to spend more than a few hours in Bozeman.
Tuesday morning is back
on I-90 west to continue our drive to Sultan, WA. One interesting thing we hadn’t noticed
before was that the large highway gas stations in Montana might have pumps for
two different companies? We pulled into
what we thought was a Flying J to fuel the RV with diesel & get our Flying
J discount. When Corrie went inside to
prepay, she discovered we were at Exxon pumps & needed to move to another
group of pumps for Flying J. We also
discovered at a brand new rest stop in Montana that they no longer have
separate men’s & women’s restrooms.
This rest area had multiple unisex restrooms, all handicap accessible,
& all with infant changing tables.
As always as we approached the Idaho/Montana border we had to stop at
the $50,000 Silver Dollar (now up to $66,542 silver dollars on display) before
camping near Post Falls, ID. (see above
BLOG link for our last visit to this world famous tourist stop) Tomorrow final push to Sultan, WA.
Wednesday morning,
AUG26, we were back on I-90 west to Sultan, WA.
Last night Dan (as he usually does) was checking diesel prices along our
route, & discovered a low diesel price that he thought must be a
mistake? But when we got to the truck
stop outside of George, WA (get it?), we discovered diesel at $2.31! To say there were a lot of semi’s waiting to
fuel-up, would be an understatement.
Since we were also stopping for lunch, the twenty minute wait didn’t
bother us.
After “reopening”
the house, we spent the rest of the month doing nothing more than gardening,
mowing, cleaning RV, partially empty RV, house maintenance, etc.
