Hungry Horse to Havre
Our delicious breakfast was huckleberry pancakes -- mine with ham and eggs, sunny side up, Debbie's with bacon -- at the Huckleberry Patch Cage in Hungry Horse. Huckleberries are so much like bilberries as to make no difference. The Hungry Horse News reports on a local biologist who's excited about "purple poo" findings, proving that bears eat huckleberries...
Next we drove along US-2 until the turnoff for Glacier National Park. We wound our way along the "Going to the Sun Road" which climbs high up into the Rockies through view upon view. The only blot was other cars just like ours.
After the heat we'd been experiencing everywhere else, it was nice to see a bit of snow.
On our way away from Glacier National Park, the landscape subsided yet again into rolling hills. This was the Blackfoot Indian reservation, so it wasn't cultivated much. As we continued out of the reservation, it flattened out even more, and became farmland.
We stopped a little off the road to look at a monument to the northernmost point of Lewis and Clark's expedition. It was covered in graffiti.
This was a pretty open point, and we decided before getting out of the car that if there was wind, we'd try putting the Flowform kite up. It was windy, alright -- far too windy for the kite to fly in a straight line without a tail. We crashed it a few times before giving up.
Next stop was Cut Bank, where we stopped for a photo next to the "coldest spot in the nation" penguin, to make use of the restrooms, to buy something to drink, and rush back to our air conditioned car. I imagine it must get cold in winter, but not now.
To go with our drinks, we bought a Rocky Road bar to share. This is marshmallow and cashew nuts, coated in chocolate.
After that, it was a 120 mile blast to Havre, via Shelby. On this stretch, we discovered that, predictably, Primal Scream's Vanishing Point makes an excellent soundtrack to long drives in a straight line.
Some roadworks slowed us down a little. We had to slow down from 70 to 35 for the duration. The roadworks consisted of 20 miles of no road whatsoever!
We did stop along the way to exchange fluids with a remote petrol station (our waste for their Vanilla Coke and Mountain Dew), where the man at the counter said three words to me: "two", "dollars" and then, a little later, "sure".
It was at about this point that we made our thousandth mile.
... and so we rolled into Havre, a metropolis, and we're in the very pleasant Siesta Motel. This is the third day where for various reasons, I've been unable to dial in to upload this diary. I hope nobody's worried at home (don't be if this happens again).
We're watching something on TV at the moment wherein a TV crew approached a community and offered to test their kids to see how they responded to strangers trying to talk to them. If the kid talks to the stranger, the parents then confront the kid, on camera, going "what if this man had taken you off and killed you", at which the kid bursts out crying. I'll giggle about that some more when we've eaten.
We ate at The Duck, which is a motel, restaurant and casino all in one. While we were in there, lightning came closer and closer, until eventually the heavens opened. From our vantage point in a window booth, we saw two local teenage girls, sodden, inviting passing cars to drench them further by driving through puddles. There's not much to do in Havre, Montana.