carry on camping with abi and andrew

tuesday 22nd september: glacier park

today bert and i cycled from apgar campsite up the road to do a small walk called the trail of the cedars. when i say small i really mean it, it was around 1mile this walk. but the cycle ride each way was 14 miles, which justified the smallness of the walk i think. plus don’t forget we were cycling on the falcon death trap and the old mountain bike, so it was more of an effort than the kind of bike ride i’m used to. the bikes coped fine, luckily there weren’t any major hills, up or down hill - down hill on the falcon is pretty scary as the brakes scream and cry out for mercy, and the headset shakes like there’s an earthquake going on, and you feel quite precarious on the narrow handlebars.

anyway there were no incidents other than tired muscles as we hadn’t done much exercise like this for a while. we stopped regularly to either look at the view, de-robe as we warmed up, or eat our cereal bar snacks. bert did a u-turn to take some close up pictures of some grizzly bear poo he had seen on the road - it was huge poo with lots of berries in, you could see it from miles away. we didn’t see the grizzly bear that made it.

the walk itself is on a wooden walkway or paved paths, through a forest, which has cedars, western hemlock, douglas fir, and another tree whose name i can’t remember.

there haven’t been fires in that part of the forest for over 500 years which means it has these trees in it rather than the more quick to regrow spindly pines you get in areas of frequent burning. hemlock has this crazy deep bark which must be half a foot thick, it’s very strange.

i made sure not to accidentally eat any of the hemlock trees in case this is where hemlock the poison comes from. we ate our sandwiches whilst looking at a typical montana view of a mountain with a river in front of it. some people came along and said hi and had we seen any animals and bert launched into the whole 5 bears and moose story from our big hiking trip. he likes telling stories, but i got the feeling these people didn’t have that much time to listen to them all in great detail.
us sitting in a tree.

we looked at cedar leaves carefully and compared them with pine leaves, we looked at a wall with water dripping down it, and at all the moss that grows on the stones and trees there, and watched the sunbeams coming through the forest in a narnia type way, and it was all very beautiful.

a cedar leaf at close quarters

then we cycled back to apgar on our deathtraps, stopping at lake macdonald lodge on the way. this lodge is very old (in american terms anyway, built in early 1900s), and backs on to lake macdonald, in fact that is the front as that used to be the only way to get there before the road was built. we looked in the gift shop and took a photo of me with a big cuddly bear.

we got back to apgar just as we were getting tired from the cycling, i wouldn’t have wanted to carry on any further on the falcon, nor bert on his bike. we were pretty impressed with our active day and rewarded ourselves with an ice cream and bert had an espresso but only after we’d had an argument about what an espresso actually was, he seemed to think i didn’t know what it was and that there wouldn’t be enough for us to share it, i said i only wanted a tiny bit anyway and i knew that espressos were tiny to begin with yes. he dumped his ice cream in it so it was no longer an espresso anyway but a coffee ice cream.

we got back to our camp and abi had left us a note on our door which was very exciting. she and andrew turned up around an hour later. andrew is a friend of hers that she met after she’d left me last year in belize, and gone to america to do a trek in the grand canyon. weirdly it was pretty much a year ago to the day that abi and i had gone our separate ways after our 2 months travelling together, and as well a year to the day that she had met andrew in america.

it was really really cool to see her again, and we talked about england, and what people were doing, and about our travels, and lots of other things too as we cooked our hotdogs on the campfire. except abi couldn’t eat the hotdogs as they were chicken based ones and she has a fatal allergy to chicken, which i had forgotten, so she had to eat bacon.

we cooked veggies on the fire too which tasted great but it’s hard to control how burnt they are getting. andrew is from england but lives in germany, he used to live in montreal until last year. he designs windmills, as in wind farm wind mills, which is a pretty cool job if you ask me. he used to sail for great britain, which we never got round to talking to him more about, and he also had some pretty scary stories about flying, like one where they had to land in the brace position as a bit of the plane had fallen off. he is really into photography, as is abi, so we all went to lake macdonald which was just round the corner, to take photos of the sunset. i had bought abi a present which was a small candle holder made of a bear holding a little piece of tree, which is where the candle goes.

she had brought me a sticker, and some things from mamma mia pepinillo in england, contact lenses, and a new camera as an early birthday present, which was really exciting, as we only have a not very good little olympus one. this one is turquoise, my favourite colour. so it was all very exciting and fun and then we all slept in the rv, and realized we had run the battery down which wasn’t so good - this happens if you use the lights/anything else that runs off the battery, without making sure the battery isn’t going flat. whilst driving obviously the battery charges itself from the engine but we hadn’t driven for a while. we vaguely panicked about this but then fell asleep.

wednesday 23rd september: kalispell to butte, montana
the battery had come back to life, hooray! panic over. bert went off back to kalispell to go to an appointment he had, and me abi and andrew went off to the trail of the cedars, to do another walk from there to avalanche lake. this was around 5 miles round trip i think, which was a nice amount for the morning. abi had injured her knee playing netball recently so was wary of walking too much, but it seemed like it was doing fine. she even climbed a tree that had rotted away in the middle.
avalanche lake was beautiful, like the lakes we had seen on our hike to the belly river a few weeks ago, really glassy and still, with the whole mountain reflected in it like a mirror.

a man told us he had seen lots of grizzly bear poo nearby, so we had a little panic, but then got over it. i told abi and andrew about uncle sid and his pet bears, and andy said what a cool story especially when he learnt the names of the bears. i said yeah isn’t amos a cool name. then realized he meant andy, because that is also his name. he thought i was being really sarcastic but really i did mean isn’t amos a cool name. i think maybe it was one of those things that are funny if you were there, but not when you explain them, but it was funny honestly. another thing about andrew (the person, not the bear cub) was that he had met the world’s tallest man on a plane. this man was 8foot 4, the tallest man before that was 8foot 1, this new man had been just discovered in turkey in a small village, and had previously never had clothes that fit, and had never worn shoes, but the guiness world record people had got this sorted for him and were looking after him. andrew showed us a photo of the tallest man in the world with 2 air hostesses, which made the air hostesses look like dwarves. perhaps it was actually that they were the smalles air hostesses in the world, standing with a normal man. andrew said it wasn’t though.

we made sandwiches by a river after we’d finished the walk, and skimmed some stones, and i commented that i didn’t think i’d ever cut cheese and tomato for a sandwich directly onto my jeans before, and that it seemed to work quite well really. we looked at some big ants, and talked about penicillin. i said wasn’t it invented from bread mould, but abi said said it was something to do with a lemming coughing onto a dish. i had misheard and actually it was fleming that invented penicillin, not a lemming. again it may have been funny just if you were there. i thought fleming would have been busy writing all those james bond novels, but he was obviously a multi-talented man.

we met up with bert in kalispell, who said the doctor had told him he was in very good health and had the fitness of a man half his age. this is good to know. we said goodbye to abi and andrew, and the plan was that we’d all reconvene in yellowstone park, which is in wyoming, the state directly south of montana. about a mile of yellowstone is in montana actually, but the majority of it is not. we weren’t exactly sure how we’d communicate as bert and i don’t have phones and abi and andrew do but they don‘t always work, but we figured we’d leave a message for each other at the old faithful lodge by old faithful geyser in the park. bert said this is what people used to do in the olden days, ie pre mobile phone days. we hoped there was such a place called the old faithful lodge.

on our way from kalispell, we stopped off at kirk’s house as he had some apples and beer for us and a hang gliding video for bert. he has a house up a mountain, where you could launch a hang glider from right there, it has an amazing view over the whole flathead valley. on the way to kirk’s house, bert had pointed out a buffalo jump, which is where the indians used to herd buffalos up and get them to fall off the cliff to the plain below, which is really quite mean, but they needed the buffalo for food. it’s a bit misleading calling it a buffalo jump, as that implies the buffalos chose to go there and have a good old jump, whereas actually it should be called a buffalo killing area. did you know bison is just another word for buffalo, i didn’t until now. we carried on south to missoula, then to butte where we spent the night in walmart carpark - you can park there the night in your rv for free, which is really a good thing to know about as there are walmarts everywhere, and we are always looking for free things. i guess walmart figure that the people parked there will buy things from walmart, which we did one day but not every time. it’s not exactly scenic, but it is very handy.

our rv only has an old stereo system with a tape player that plays out of one speaker, the one on the driver’s side. we had bought some tapes from thrift shops which really took me back to my youth thinking about tapes, and how i used to record songs from the top 40 on the radio each sunday on to a tape and then listen to them during the week. especially that time that bryan adams was at number one for 16 weeks, i’d run upstairs during dinner to put it on to record around 7pm when the top 40 finished. and i’d record it again the next week, in case i happened to get it for a bit longer if they didn’t start speaking over it so soon before it had finished. on our rv stereo you put the tape in and the tape player goes mental for a few minutes, and you have to press all the buttons for a while until it calms down and decides to do its job and just play the tape for you. it’s quite annoying, but i suppose it adds personality to the rv.

another thing i thought about on the drive today and discussed with bert but neither of us had any answers, was a lexical question to do with rivers, lakes and mountains. my question is why is it mount everest, but teakettle mountain? or the river thames, but yellowstone river? or lake havasu, but flathead lake? our best guess was that it just depends who got round to naming it first and their own personal preference. whether or not there is an answer, i like the fact that i noticed it and have recorded it here for more people to ponder over.

thursday 24th september: butte, montana to west yellowstone, wyoming
bert got up at 4am and started driving, so we would get the rest of the way to yellowstone in time to hook up with abi and andrew, even though we didn’t know how far they had got on their drive yesterday and where they were now etc. bert figured it would be better to be in yellowstone nice and early to sort things out. he is good at things like that, like being early and organised for things. so i rolled around trying not to fall out of bed and thinking blimey this is a bit strange. it’s like when you’re on a night train or a night bus and you try to sleep but then you think that the bus/train is veering off the road/tracks, because it seems to be so strange to travel lying down and your brain gets in a muddle. so i kept waking up and hoping everything was ok up in the front, which seemed like a long way away from the bedroom at the back. i eventually got up around 7, as i was getting a bit tired of rolling around panicking whilst trying to sleep. we got to west yellowstone, the town to the west just outside of yellowstone, at around 8 and found a payphone to call abi and andrew from but couldn’t get them on their mobiles. we rang old faithful inn, who said they weren’t a message centre thank you very much. we went for a muffin and a coffee and drove on into old faithful to investigate things. on the way down there we passed tons of geysers and bubbling bits of ground and pools and mud pools.



we realised that i pronounce geyser - geezar - like with the meaning of old man - and bert pronounces it gi-zer - like apparently it is supposed to be pronounced. i don’t think there is a ruling on which is correct so i kept pronouncing it my way.

we found the old faithful lodge, there is an inn, a lodge and a snow lodge, and we left a message for abi and andrew, there was no messages for us. we left our message saying we were camping at madison campground and to come and find us. we watched old faithful geyser going off, which was pretty cool - lots of water shoots up in to the air and lots of steam pours out - we got a shower from the water as the wind was blowing our direction.

then we drove back to madison campground to check in. when we got there there was a message from abi and andrew saying they were camping there and what pitch they were in. cool, so we went to find them, but they had gone off again in the car. so we sat in the rv and bert rested as he was tired from his crazy early driving day and his flu and pneumonia shots he’d had the day before.

i looked at my new camera and took some photos. the landscape of yellowstone is totally different to glacier - it’s got big wide huge yellowy plains, wide flat blue rivers, herds of buffalos off in the distance like you see in wildlife documentaries. it has mountains too but not great big huge ones like in glacier park.

abi and andrew found us that evening and we went to their campsite for camp fire dinner - pasta and pork and veggies. turns out they had left the note at the campsite without having got our one from the lodge, but by chance we were all camping at the same place, which was funny.

friday 25th september: madison campground to fishing bridge campground, yellowstone park
up at 545am to go and see animals - the best time to see them is early morning, or evening, this is when they are moving around, eating and the like. apparently bears are moving around getting food to fill up with before hibernating, and it is rutting season for elks, so it’s a good time generally to see animals. the first thing we saw was a coyote or wolf crossing the road, too dark to get a good photo. then we saw a herd of elks - they are like big deer, not as big as a moose (which we still haven’t seen), around the size of a horse. the men ones have antlers. they are very majestic animals. the males (bull elks) seem to hang out with a big group of cow ones, as they are looking for girlfriends, and they trot around them herding them up and watching them eat grass, whilst deciding which one to ask out on a date.

they bugle every now and then, which is when they make a big loud kind of trumpetty noise, which apparently is a sign of their size and strength and prestige etc - to attract the females and to ward off other bull elks from their pitch.

we watched all this for a while, then bert spotted a buffalo on his own on the other side of the road. i had read that buffalos are dangerous and have gored many visitors, so we didn’t go close to him. buffalos are very cool, they just mosey around hoovering up the grass, they have big heads and a hump which gives their head a kind of snow plowing power.

after all this excitement we went back to ours for pancakes and bacon and to look at our photos. we then set off to fishing bridge campground in the east of yellowstone, but on getting 20 miles or so away from it, the traffic was all being turned around due to a fire blowing over the road. they aren’t allowed to put out fires that have started naturally, this one had been started by lightning striking the ground a few days earlier. (another law of yellowstone is that you’re not allowed to imitate a wolf howl noise). this is when we saw the huge pyrocumulus cloud which i put a picture of in an earlier blog. so we went back to old faithful to have some drinks and play cards, and keep an eye on the situation via the ranger information.

an artistic shot of my camera reflected in my shades, taken whilst having a drink at old faithful.

bert would make a good ranger we decided, and it is what he would have been if he hadn’t been into flying. we trapped a wasp under a cup, and abi said careful when you let it out as it will probably make a beeline for us. i said surely she meant a waspline. we looked at the old faithful inn (the oldest lodge in america apparently), there was a little crow’s nest bit on the top floor that overlooked all the other floors, which is now closed due to an earthquake in 1959 in yellowstone which made the timbers unsafe. in the past though an orchestra used to play up there whilst people danced around on the balconies.

we heard the road was back opened and set off all excited to our next site. we had to drive through all the smoke and bert saw flames in the trees off to the left whilst i was filming the smoke over yellowstone lake on the right. it was a bit scary to be that close to a fire, but exciting too, and obviously safe enough otherwise the ranger wouldn’t have sent us through. the ranger told abi and andrew not to stop under any circumstances, even if they saw a bear on fire doing cartwheels across the road. he didn’t say anything to us, bert figured it was because we didn’t look like tourists so we didn’t need advice. maybe, maybe not.

that night’s site was a bit of a busy and not very pretty rv site, all the rvs rammed in next to each other as close as possible, so you can watch your neighbour’s tv or watch them doing their washing up. we got a full hook up though so could have the lights on to our heart’s content.

saturday 26th september: fishing bridge campground, to cooke city (montana/wyoming border)
up again at 6ish to go look at wildlife.

firstly i saw some otters swimming through a river, about 6 of them. then we stopped to look at some fairly close buffalo, walking along in a herd, hoovering the grass, and drinking down at the lake. after a while they had surrounded the car, and all other cars around us. one of them, the alpha buffalo, was growling lots and loudly, and hounding one of the girl buffalos as she tried to eat her breakfast. one of the other ones fell down a sandy bank towards the lake and rolled around for a while unable to get up properly, which was pretty funny. i think he was trying to cover up his fall and make it look like a planned roll around in the mud, but it definitely wasn’t.

i was freaking out to be that close to all these huge buffalos even though we were in the car, and not really at a big risk. i was worried one would put his head through the open window and try to eat us. bert told me to shut up as he was trying to video it all.



nobody else seemed scared, as usual. i scrambled over bert to the other side of the car when one of them came too close for comfort, then we watched and giggled as they headbutted the car behind us. we saw a few other lone buffalos and some more herds along the way, but no other species of wildlife. we really wanted to see a bear or a wolf, but these are harder to spot. it’s funny how the first time we saw that lone buffalo we were totally amazed and taking tons of photos, but after the whole herd then seeing some more, you just go oh look a buffalo on the road, let’s go round him. it becomes normality very quickly.

a grizzly bear, abi, and andrew

after another bacony pancakey breakfast we went on a 6 mile walk along yellowstone canyon to a place called point sublime. we stopped loads along the way to take photos and look at the view, which was stunning - a huge deep canyon with red, yellow, white stone sides, and some huge waterfalls along the way.


on arriving at sublime point, we decided it wasn’t that sublime compared to the other places we’d stopped en route, and that we would have named it anticlimax point instead. perhaps the people who named it were coming the other way, and comparatively to that maybe it was sublime. we also thought there should be another point called ridiculous point so you could go from the sublime to the ridiculous. we took some photos of gummy bears (see earlier blog), and tried to decide whether that funny noise we had heard was a bear or a tree blowing in the wind. me and abi though the latter, but bert and andrew said it was definitely a bear. the walk back took 1 hour 15 mins instead of the 3 hours it took on the way there as we had stopped to look at things so much.
a bird


a waterfall

a canyon

a tree (dead)

us at the end of the hike

after this we drove up dunraven pass to look for bears as we heard a ranger saying that’s where they are at the moment. there were lots of photographers out with big huge cameras and lenses, they’d been there pretty much all day waiting for a grizzly to appear that supposedly appears each day around 6pm. we looked for a bit but then gave up. me and bert left to carry on heading south at this point, and abi and andrew were going to go back up north towards calgary where they had come from last week. when we left them we did in fact see a black bear loping down the hillside, at quite a distance so no good for photos. was cool to see one at a safe distance after our previous close encounters. apparently the bears eat this one particular type of moth to fill up on calories for the winter hibernation period, because the moth is more calorific than the equivalent amount of elk meat or other meat would be for the bears. they tip up stones to find the moths and then gorge on them. weird that such big animals survive on things like moths and berries.

we planned to try to find a campsite in the north east of the park but the sites were all full, so we carried on out of the park and stopped in a town called cooke city for a beer and to see if they had advice re places to park. not really, but they gave us names of other sites. in the end we parked in a parking lot on the wyoming/montana border.

it’s great paying nothing for your night’s accommodation. we wondered where abi and andrew had managed to camp that night, but had no way of contacting them, they must have been ok and not eaten by bears as i have heard from mammamia that abi is back in england now.

eureka!

thursday 17th september
we left kalispell and drove up to eureka to visit bert’s relatives. bert has a very large family, which i had to take notes on to get my head round. en route we stopped by a lake to eat a sandwich and again exclaimed at how totally cool it is living in a motorhome and being able to stop and eat your lunch in it wherever you want. bert told me he used to ice skate and sledge at the lake we were eating lunch by.

the old school house in pinkham creek, eureka - bert's mum and her sister used to ride their horses to it.

here is a quick tour of bert’s family. his mother is called ellagene, and is married to bill. she was first married to bob combs, who she had robert (bert) and gary by. then she married corky and had 4 children by him - marsha, terry, rene, and clinton. then she married bill who she is married to now. ellagene was 1 of 9 children - of which 5 are still alive. she is really lovely and was very pleased to see bert and to meet me (i think/hope). we showed them photos of belize and our trip so far to montana. we visited gary and his wife and one of his 4 children (he is the one with the children whose names all beginning with tr - troy, travis, tracy, trevor). they have a huge wooden log cabin style house.


they live on land which is called homestead, which means it was given to them by the government ages ago as it is in fairly remote montana, and was fairly inhospitable. bert’s greatgrandfather’s job was to kill off the grizzly bears to make the land more hospitable. the point of homestead land is that you can’t sell it, you can only pass it down from one generation to the next. gary built ellagene’s house on the homestead land, next door to his one.

the original homestead where bert's grandparents lived and where bert spent a lot of his youth - it's not lived in anymore but they still have it.

we camped down the road in monty, outside uncle sid’s old cabin. uncle sid, one of ellagene’s brothers (they were 7 boys and 2 girls), is now in a nursing home, but he is totally compos mentis and plays the harmonica really well, he is 90 years old and i would say he’ll live to be 100 or more he’s in such good shape.

friday 18th september
this morning there were 2 coyotes over the other side of the road, eating a dead deer. some horses came nosing around to see what was going on, but they didn’t get to eat any deer, nor did the ravens that were hovering above. it’s amazing to be so immersed in wildlife up here, there were tons of deer around our camp last night, it really is like being in narnia. they are white tail deers, when they turn around to run off you just see these flashes of white which is their tails bobbing up and down. we’re normally too busy putting our camera on the video setting, or putting a new disc in the video camera, to actually get any good footage of all this amazing animal activity but i assure you it does exist as our usually blurry photos attest to.

after this wildlife show we walked up to see ellagene and bill again.

they used to travel around in their motorhome for years until they got too old to carry on, plus bill is connected to an oxygen tank now as he only has 28% of his lungs left. they gave us lots of motorhome tips, and some motorhome magazines. we went up the road to one of bert’s cousin’s house - she’s called sandy and is married to jon. uncle sid was visiting from the home, with sidneylu, his daughter. sandy is also his daughter. they all reminisced, and we told them about belize and showed pictures, and he told us about his time in england in the war. he had sailed to liverpool which had taken 3 weeks, then been posted in litham which is near manchester, for 2 years, then on to belgium, france, holland, and germany. sid told us also about how they used to have pet bear cubs when he was little in pinkham creek - they had found them in the woods, their mum had died, or been killed, so they trapped them and took them home in boxes on horseback. sid was only about 10 and his dad, charlie, kept shouting at him that if the bears tried to get out of their boxes he had to hit them with a stick so they didn’t scratch or scare the horses that were carrying them. they kept them in the yard in a big cage with a pole that they could climb up. they were called amos and andy.

sid played us 4 songs on the harmonica and was generally really entertaining and funny and happy - i have noticed that the old people in this part of the world all seem to be happy, not grumbly old stereotypical old people, which is very refreshing and makes a change. i suppose it’s not that all old people are grumpy, maybe it’s just that there are grumpy people in the world and there are happy people of every age, and maybe more of the grumpy ones live longer. i think quality of life in montana is high and therefore people are quite content and are living or have lived a fulfilling, healthy, outdoor life surrounded by amazing landscapes and animals and other equally happy and wholesome people.

after the afternoon at sandy’s house we walked back through the fields and along the creek - this area is called pinkham creek. a horse followed us along for a while, and nibbled my coat, we tried to feed him a werthers original sweet but he spat it out.

we walked past a really cute little cabin, like one from one of those little red riding hood type stories, and peered through the window - there was a stove and a bed with a homemade quilt on it, and a table with a flowery tablecloth. bert said i bet this is one of my relative’s cabins, and it turned out it was aunt lula and uncle randall’s.

lula is ellagene’s sister. bert hasn’t been back here for around 5 years and he loved being back, and telling me all his memories from childhood and talking about them with his mum. again, i could write a whole other blog about these stories, but i haven’t got time now. it must be brilliant having a family that big, bert has cousins he doesn’t even know about as he had all those uncles and aunts, and other extended family.

that night we cooked potatoes in the campfire, they were pretty burnt on the outside, i think the trick is it to put a nail in them so the heat transfers to the middle bits quicker. we wandered to the creek down a little trail and i freaked out when bert pointed out bear footprints on the trail.

the potatoes are the 2 silver blobs in the fire above, and below is me toasting some bread.



sunday 20th september
a day of much visiting. we started off by having coffee and pancakes with cousin leland (lee) (sandy and sidneylu‘s brother, sid‘s son).

lee was who bert had joined the airforce with when he had just finished high school. they had gone down to the army offices to sign up, this was during the vietnam war. they were going to sign up to the marines, but when they got there, the marine recruiting officer’s office had a sign on the door saying out for lunch. the man next door was the recruiting officer for the airforce, and he saw them looking at the marine door and he said you better come and talk to me first before deciding you want to join the marines. so they went to talk to him and they joined the airforce instead. thank god, as i’m sure they would surely have died had they been sent to vietnam as marines. they were then transferred to wichita airforce base in kansas, which is where bert learnt to fly, and became an air traffic controller. he stayed in the airforce there for 3 and a half years, and was never called up to go to vietnam, again thankfully. one day they did call him up to go there, and he went to get fitted for his uniform and the uniform fitter man noticed that the number was wrong, and it turned out that there were 2 robert combs, with id numbers just one number different, and it was the other robert combs they wanted. talk about a lucky escape.

lee said he liked the sound of belize, and maybe he’d go and live there too.

next we went to visit uncle jack and aunt carol. jack was the youngest of the 9 workmans, so robert had pretty much grown up with him as a child. jack took us for a ride in his old car, as in one of those really old cars, i think it was born in 1923. robert had learnt to drive in it when he was little and remembered driving it into a stump. their dog taz came for the drive too, he loved it.

we drove down to eureka in it and looked at an old log cabin which had been reconstructed in the town like a little museum, it’s original location was up in the woods somewhere. they mentioned charlie workman on the little information board (ellagene’s dad, bert’s grandfather) as he used to pack supplies into the woods on his horses.

jack and carol showed us loads of old photos of various family members, i took photos with our camera, so now we have photos of photos which generally came out well but you have to hold the camera really still and hold your breath when you take them and not wobble or they go blurry. jack and carol had an rv just like ours but 5 feet shorter.

after this we went to the home to visit uncle sid, and aunt vivian who was uncle chuck’s wife. also carol, jack’s wife, her mother carla graves was there. sid played a tune on his harmonica again. it was meal time so we only stayed a little while. it’s kind of sad that old people sometimes have to go to homes like that, when really they must prefer to be in their own homes or being looked after by their families. sometimes i guess they need full time care, but sometimes they don’t and they could be elsewhere. it’s funny how some cultures don’t do this at all, like india or mexico, where lots of generations of the family all live in the same house and look after each other - seems to make more sense to me and be a lot nicer. plus you can’t just ignore old age and death and put them away somewhere and never think about them again, old people are really important and have lots of wisdom and stories.

we stopped for a sandwich in town and a rest from all the visiting.

we then carried on visiting. we went to aunt lula’s and uncle randall’s. they lived up on tobacco road, by the railroad at the end. lula is ellagene’s only sister, the other 7 of the 9 were brothers. lula and randall were really cool - they have a house with a great view of mountains and fields. their first house burnt down, but they built this one, exactly the same and on the same exact spot around 20 years ago i think. lula paints pictures, mainly from old photos, of lakes and bears and horses and mountains, and packing supplies into the wilderness.

she worked for the forest service when she was younger, and her and randall used to go square dancing up in canada. randall has cancer and wasn’t doing so well, but he told me too about going to england in the war, seems like he got a faster boat over than uncle sid as it took him only 5 days. he went down south, then on to europe too. lula had tons of old photos, though tons more she had lost in the house fire she said. we spent hours taking photos of these too.

we slept in monty outside their house, and it got freezing in the night. lula warned us that if we heard gunshots in the early morning it would be her shooting at skunks as they’d had a lot around recently and they were a real problem.

monday 21st september
we didn’t hear any skunk gunshots. we had pancakes with lula and randall at their house and looked at more photos. lula and randall didn’t have children so they had adopted all the other children and done loads for them and with them, so bert is very close to lula. she’s really cool, kind of hippie ish. she had a really warm looking thick green dressing gown, i told her i was once making pancakes and my dressing gown sleeve caught fire, she said the same thing had happened to her once too.

photo gallery of some of the old photos we got photos of:

robert as a young boyuncle sid in the armyellagene at her graduation

bert, his brother gary and his half brother clinton, on a motorbike

grandparents charles and alta workman

all the workman 9 siblings and charles and alta the parents

we left lula and randall's after breakfast, and left eureka, which was quite sad having met so many amazing people there. there were more we could have visited, but you only have so much time to do these things, and we had to get on the road. so from here we drove down to glacier park, to apgar campsite, the one we had camped in before setting off on our hike. this was practically the only one open as it’s late in the season now and lots of them close. we set up our site and then cycled to the atm as we didn’t have any money to pay the ranger with for the site. bert gets a free pass to all the national parks in america, and half price camping too, as he is a bit older than me and something you get when you get a bit older is free things because the idea is you have worked a lot and paid your taxes all your life and this is your reward. plus they like to see older people doing things like going to national parks.

we cycled over a river and looked at some fish all lined up in the current, it was weird, there were about 60 to 100 of them all in a line, a few would break away and go for a swim, but the others were all there. it must have been a particularly nice bit of water for them to be in, or maybe they’d had a tip off that some food was going to be there. we had left abi a note on the door of monty as we weren’t sure when she was arriving, as we’d only been in touch every now and then on email and she was travelling down from calgary with her friend andrew. when we got back our note was still there, so we figured they would arrive the next day.

two socks

saturday 12th september: kalispell, montana
we went to a wedding, armed (footed) with the walmart shoes. it was the wedding of greg, who is - you’ve guessed it - an old hang gliding friend of bert’s. he was marrying patti. it was at a little resort in an area just outside kalispell called happy valley. bert met up with some other old hang gliding friends, they talked about how they were older now than they used to be, and had grey hair and things. kirk and debbie were there with their 2 girls, danielle and dallas - debbie told me everyone in her family has a name beginning with d. i asked her if they called dallas dallas because of that show debbie does dallas - she said it was because they ran out of ideas by the time dallas came along and that’s why she got called dallas.

dallas and danielle were cool, and knew lots of dance routines as they do cheer leading, so we did the macarena, and they did a little routine to cotton eye jo which was really funny. we all drank beer and sambuca and danced the night away, and generally had a great time.


sunday 13th september
had slight hangovers. went for a walk after breakfast, sat in the hot tub at the resort, tried to find a cool igloo house i’d seen in the area before but couldn’t find it, lay down and had a picnic, went to bed. a pretty non eventful day.


monday 14th september
went back to kalispell and camped monty at wayne and elaine’s house - the couple we’d bought monty from.
i wandered into kalispell and hung out for a bit at the library and outside an art gallery - i thought about going in to the gallery but couldn’t quite bring myself to do that so sat and ate an apple and swished wasps away instead. i bought a book about the arab-israeli conflict in a library sale for 50c. i have read the first chapter of it and it’s sat in a cupboard since then. i find it really hard to understand things to do with politics and religion, no matter how hard i try. it’s not that i don’t try, i really do, but i can’t quite grasp it. i think people’s brains are just inclined towards grasping some things and not others. like yesterday i was really trying to understand the little drawing of the electrical circuit in the motorhome guidebook, and had to ask bert loads of questions, and eventually he thought i was just trying to wind him up, but i really wasn’t. i did manage to find the fuse box though so felt really good about that. anyway i’m going to persevere with my arab-israeli book as i’m sure i’ll pick something up from it at some point.

i also bought a puncture repair kit as we had bought 2 bikes for $10 each, from wayne and elaine - the previously mentioned falcon bike which the bike shop had written off as a death trap (and i have to partially agree having ridden it a few times by now), and another much better old mountain bike which bert has been riding. we went on a little ride later on today up the road to test them out properly - they are both 10 speed, but really mine is about 3 or 4 speed as it won’t go into the other 5 or 6 gears. the whole headset wobbles when you brake as it needs tightening up, and the seat is pretty uncomfy, but overall the whole bike is just so cool and it was $10, that i do really love it. i intend to slowly get it back to a much more ride-able condition, by replacing all the parts.

today i also visited a book shop and stumbled across a book called stumbling on happiness - which i mentioned above about the nature of modern life and happiness and people’s quest for happiness. it’s really well written by some professor of psychology and isn’t a self help style book but more about cognitive science, like the way our brains work in terms of imagination and belief systems and trying to figure out the best thing for us to do in situations, and future planning etc. did you know that the frontal lobe of the brain is the part that deals with the concept of future, and also anxiety and planning? this part of the brain developed fairly recently in terms of human development - ie early man didn’t have it, and thus lived in a continuous present, and was probably a hell of a lot more content. the brain developed from 1 and a half pounds to 3 pounds with the addition of this frontal lobe bit, which is also the bit that they used to remove as a form of therapy for criminals, depressed people etc. anyway i recommend this book, it’s really a good read, and i read it in 2 days as it’s so readable. even if it doesn’t change your life it certainly won’t do you any harm.

tuesday 15th september
we drove up to foy’s lake, just up the road from wayne and elaine’s.

bert used to live here when he was in his twenties. once he was driving home there from town and was a little bit drunk and realised after a while that the police were following him. he turned off his headlights and sped up loads, turned onto his road using the handbrake so his brake lights didn’t come on, drove the car straight into the garage, flew into his house, took his clothes off, put his pyjamas and dressing gown on, waited for the knock at the door, waited a while to answer it and then answered it all sleepy looking and yawning. the police stood there and said - why is your garage light on? bert said i’ve been having problems with that light staying on recently officer. the police said - we know it was you, we’re gonna get you, you better watch out. bert had a red porsche, so was pretty recognizable and had to be really careful after that, but they never did get him.

we swam in the lake, and watched some people jet ski and complained to each other about how noisy they were. we rode our bikes up the road from the motorhome, and watched some horses jumping over jumps in the distance. that night we watched dances with wolves, which is my dad’s favourite film, apart from when it was usurped from that position by mamma mia, the strange but compelling and ridiculously unbelievable abba based musical about a girl on a greek island. you may wonder at the extreme polar opposite of father pickles having these 2 films as his favourites, but that pretty much sums him up i’d say. anyway dances with wolves is excellent, i can’t believe i hadn’t seen it up until now, but some things you just don’t get round to, like i’d never had beetroot until a few weeks ago.

wednesday 16th september
i tried on some hats in kalispell. we shared a lemon and poppyseed muffin.