Rex and Nancy's Travels - "ALL WHO WANDER ARE NOT LOST" - JRR Tolkein

We left Missoula Sunday morning and drove to Virginia City, MT. We are staying in the Virginia City RV Park about a half mile outside of town. We will stay here for a few days and tour Virginia City and Nevada City. It rained most of the night and Monday morning was cool and cloudy. We drove into Virginia City and spent the day walking around and looking at the shops. Virginia City was a mining camp in the 1860’s and is now considered a ghost town even though it has 150 residents. The town is managed by the Montana Heritage Preservation and Development Commission and preservation projects are ongoing. They have moved a lot of original buildings from area mining towns to recreate Virginia City as it was in the late 1800’s. Many of the buildings have displays such as a general store, a clothing store, a blacksmith shop and a newspaper from that era. Many of the buildings had ongoing tourist type businesses in them. We even found Bob’s Place! Bob was a miner who was disabled in a mine ex...

We left Polson Thursday morning and headed South to Missoula and are staying at Jim and Mary’s RV Park just outside of Missoula. Friday we went to the Missoula Smokejumpers Base and Visitors Center. We took a guided tour through the facility and learned a lot about the smoke jumpers. The jumpers make their own jump suits and all the packs they use and also repair their parachutes. There are around 200 smoke jumpers in the US and 76 are based here – 10% are women. They have 2 jump planes – this is their DC 5. We went to Fort Missoula, which was established in 1877 and during WWII was used as an Alien Detention Center for nonmilitary Italian men (merchant seamen, Worlds Fair employees and the crews of Italian luxury liners seized in American Waters). It housed 1,200 Italians and, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 650 Japanese-American men. It was decommissioned in 1947. There were only a few Fort building left. They also had a church, a schoolhouse, a fire lookout tower and a disp...

We headed towards Flathead Lake Monday morning and stopped in Kalispell to get our air conditioner repaired. It had stopped working a couple of weeks ago and August is not the time to be without an air conditioner. The RV dealer we stopped at gave us the name of the guy who does their air conditioning work. He was able to fix the air conditioner (a switch had burned out) in a couple of hours and we were on our way. We drove to Polson, MT at the south end of Flathead Lake and are going to stay here for a few days. We are staying at Eagle Nest RV, which has a cherry orchard on one side, a golf course on one side and a horse pasture on another side. It is a really nice park with lots of grass and trees. Unfortunately, we are at the end of the cherry season and we might not be able to find any fresh cherries. Tuesday morning we decided to take a drive around Flathead Lake. This is a very scenic area with lots of fruit orchards. We found a fruit stand and bought cherries, peaches, tomatoes ...

Today we drove the Going To The Sun Road, which is the only road that goes completely across Glacier National Park. We stopped at the Visitor Center at Logan Pass and hiked the trail to the Hidden Lake Overlook. We saw mountain goats, big horn sheep, a marmot (the Ranger called him “Mr. Mayor”), and a big fat chipmunk. The view from the overlook was breath taking. After our hike we continued on the Going To The Sun Road to the east side of the park and on North to Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada. Yes, we decided to brave the border once again – this time we only had the truck and didn’t have anything the border agent needed. This is our first time to visit Waterton and it is very much like Glacier – just smaller. We were very fortunate to see two bears eating berries at different locations (one grizzly bear and one black bear) and another black bear crossed the road in front of us. On the way back across Glacier National Park we stopped to view Jackson Glacier. We found...

This morning we drove to Glacier National Park and stopped at McDonald Lake. We then hiked the Trail of the Cedars, a beautiful trail through a red cedar and hemlock forest. We came across a cedar tree that had fallen and had an interesting exposed root system. The sun shining on this red cedar stump was a great photo opportunity. We turned off the Trail of the Cedars and hiked the trail to Avalanche Lake. This trail followed Avalanche Creek where there were beautiful falls through a narrow gorge. Avalanche Lake was a gorgeous mountain lake surrounded by spectacular waterfalls. The trail was very crowded. We have usually taken our trips in the fall when the National Parks have not been very crowded. Consequently, we were not prepared for the large crowds and amount of traffic. It is still a beautiful area.

We left Lake Pend Orielle today and headed towards Montana. Shortly after crossing the border from Idaho into Montana and just before we reached Libby, we stopped at Kootenai Falls. We took a short hike to the falls and another short hike to a suspension bridge over the Kootenai River. On the way to the falls there is an elevated bridge over the railroad tracks and the stairs were expanded metal with anti-slip cleats. The dogs did not like going on these stairs and Nancy didn’t like the fact that you could see below the stairs as you climbed. The falls were beautiful and worth braving the stairs. When we got to the suspension bridge Rex and Camille were the only ones brave enough to walk over it. Nancy and Cody stayed behind and watched. We stopped in Kalispell and got some much needed groceries and supplies. We drove towards Glacier National Park and stopped at Mountain Meadow RV Park outside of Hungry Horse, MT. We are going to spend a couple of days looking around Glacier Nat...

This morning we drove to Lake Pend Orielle in Idaho – what a beautiful area this is. We are camped at Island View RV near Hope, ID. We are across the street from the lake and camped in a nice shady, grassy area – we think we will stay here for a couple of days. While we were relaxing in the shade this afternoon white tail deer came into the campground – 2 does and a fawn. These are fairly tame deer as they came right up to our site and the dogs barking didn’t bother them much. Later we saw other campers feeding and petting one of the deer – no wonder they keep coming into the campground! There are also osprey flying around the area – we didn’t see too many but they were very vocal. We found a plum tree loaded with little yellow plums at one end of the campground - picked a few and they are sweet, juicy and delicious. We spent Thursday morning helping our neighbor who came in last night - the jack on the front of their trailer stripped out while they were unhooking and dropped the trai...

We left Kamloops and headed southeast to the Okanagan Valley. This is a beautiful valley that has fruit orchards and vineyards all along the road. This area is also more populated than north and central BC so Rex has to get used to lots of traffic again. We stopped at Okanagan Lake Provincial Park around noon. This park is on Okanagan Lake and is very popular with boaters, consequently it was almost full but we were able to find a site for the night. After lunch we went looking for wineries. There are over 200 vineyards between here and the US border. After stopping at several wineries, we managed to find one that had some nice sweet fruit wines that we like. We stopped at a fruit/vegetable stand and bought some great peaches and tomatoes. We didn’t buy too much as we are going to cross into the US tomorrow and are not sure if we can bring any fruit back into the US. This stand also had some blueberry and peach muffins so we bought one of each for breakfast tomorrow. After t...

This morning we walked to the BC Wildlife Park and spent a couple of hours walking around. This is a small park that takes in injured wildlife to rehabilitate and release back into the wild. The animals that cannot be released are kept in the park. They have grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, buffalo, cougars, raccoons, porcupine, mountain goats, elk among others. It is family oriented with an educational center and a nice playground/picnic area. These fawns are going to be released back into the wild so we were not allowed to get very close to them. The opossum is a permanent resident. We had a very enjoyable lunch with Marion, a friend from our RV Park in Arizona. She has a very nice bed and breakfast in Kamloops. The lunch was delicious and we enjoyed spending the afternoon with her and look forward to seeing her again in Arizona.