What. A. Week. I’ve recently begun getting a Mary Kay business started (I’m an independent beauty consultant now, yay!) and between that and schoolwork, my week has been eaten up with doing everything but working on my blog. Except for that day I made an outline of the rest of the posts for my vacation and then accidentally posted it. It took me about 24 hours to realize it was live before I pulled it down. So if you saw something with a lot of typos that didn’t make any sense, it was a complete booboo.
I think I left off when we finally made it to Whitefish, Mont. We made it through the epic tire blowout, the stranded in Billings and part one of white knuckle driving through Montana. (Look for White Knuckles Part Two in the next post or two.) First off, let me tell you we loved the Cheap Sleep Motel. It is cheap as in price, and definitely not a luxury hotel, but the reviews were right when they said it was clean. With its cinder block walls, I kind of felt like I was back in elementary school. But my elementary school didn’t have better Wi-Fi than the Microtel we stayed at in Cheyenne or a bigger flatscreen TV than just about anywhere else we stayed. Or an understanding staff that worked with us when we were stranded and a day late for our reservation.
Did you know Glacier is a rainforest? I didn’t until I got there.
So, finally, we made it to what we realized is our holy place: Glacier National Park. We were able to move our reservations with Swan Mountain Outfitters from Monday to Tuesday, albeit we lost our Cowboy Cookout. Instead, we had a two-hour ride scheduled in the afternoon. So, in the morning we decided to take a little time and check out Flathead Lake. We wanted to venture down to Wild Horse Island State Park, home to – you guessed it! – wild horses and bighorn sheep, but with all the hangups we experienced in the trip to that point, we were just worried we’d never make it to the corral. So we just took a short walk around part of the lake, got a few pictures and headed out to Glacier.
Let me just tell you right now that if I had to go through everything on that trip again just to get to Glacier, I’d just about do it. That being said, next time, we’re still flying into Missoula anyway. The most accessible way to see the park is to take the Going to the Sun Road that divides the wilderness into northern and southern parts. But to truly experience it, you have to get on some of the miles of hiking trails into the back country. Sadly, we didn’t get the time to get off the beaten path this year – remember we lost a day to car trouble early in the trip – but Lacey and I are both doing our best to get back next year so we can hike out to Iceberg Lake, among other places.
That’s right, pictures of rocks and water. I’m mesmerized by clear water (I’m used to the Ohio River!) and I can’t get over how pretty the rocks are in McDonald Lake.
Even though my explorations in the world are admittedly limited, I can’t imagine a place closer to heaven. We didn’t have a lot of time for sight seeing before our ride, but we did get the chance to stop at McDonald Lake. A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll just direct you to the photo at the top of this post to see what I mean. I had never seen water as clear as Flathead Lake until I saw Lake McDonald. You could look out into the water and see, in detail, the rocks lining the bottom of the lake, and see the line under the water several feet out where the lake went from inches deep to a seeming abyss. I’ve never seen anything like it.
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