The family is on a road trip to Yellowstone and other points in Montana and the near West.
We set off around 8:30am on Saturday, and after a horrendous coffee mixup in North Bend (can you believe the barista has never heard of Yellowstone?), we were on I-90 and headed east by 9:30 or so.
Entering the Misty Mountains of Washington
We stopped at the shores of the might Columbia R. for a rest stop in Vantage, WA. This part of the trip is one that I’ve done most, including several trips to WSU while I was in college, and a handful of trips to the Gorge at George for concerts. Once you get past Moses Lake (gas stop), though, we were into territory that I’d only been over a couple of times, and the last time (on my 1998 “vision quest”) had been at night, so a lot of Spokane and through Idaho was sort of new to me.
We lunched out of the cooler in the car, and were in Coeur d’Alene, ID around 2pm. I picked up a Mac-to-VGA adapter at Best Buy (thanks for the gift card, Paul!), and we continued through the Idaho panhandle and into Montana.
The kids were pretty restless by the time we started descending through the mountains (the ID/MT border is right at the peak of the pass), so the final couple of hours of the trip were pretty hellish. Lots of pretty little river valley towns in Idaho, and significantly smaller ones in Montana. We saw a purple mountain, and got a photo.
Purple mountain’s majesty
The ID/MT border is also where the time changes to MDT, so we’re all about staying up a little later. We got to Missoula, MT around 6pm local time, right around 500mi into the trip. It probably would have been better for the family’s sanity to have stopped in Spokane or Coeur d’Alene for the night, but it felt very satisfying to have seen 3 states in one day.
We drove across town to the area near the college (Missoula is home to UofM), and had some Asian fusion food at a place that was highly rated on Yelp. They were trying too hard; the food was just OK, and the service was horrible.
We gassed up again in Missoula, and bedded down for the night.
Tomorrow, we are bound for Phillipsburg, where we hope to dig some sapphires like I did last time I was in town, and we have reservations in Bozeman for 2 nights. Should be an easier trip tomorrow; Bozeman is only about 200mi away.