Wilds of Montana 8-16-07

This was posted on Sat. the 18th at a wifi hotspot.
These first pictures are of our sunset last night, spectacular with the smoke in the air!

We hit the road around ten leaving the little burg of Harrison. Drove up the east shore of Coeur d’Alene Lake, the road along there is about 30-35 miles long. It reminded us a lot of our old Lake Almanor!

We went into CDA to check out an RV Park but we weren’t impressed so we pressed on. CDA is over 35,000 people and growing fast, lots of lloooonnnngggg traffic signals and traffic. It is forested though and pretty, what we saw of it. We saw an RV Park north of Coeur d’Alene on 95 that we would try the next time we were ever through here.

This train raced us across Lake Pend Oreille on our way into Sandpoint. Looks like a neat little town, touristy, but had signs that it favored walkers…yay, our kind of town! We didn’t feel like trying to find a place to park our rig and having lived in a summer tourist town for 14 years we decided to keep on going and visit it another time.

We kept going north through Bonners Ferry and then picked up highway 2 east into Montana. It was very smoky and we lost an hour, back into Mountain Time. We stopped for some lunch and then continued on and pulled into the first National Forest Service campground we came across. We found a long, gorgeous site on the Kootenai River just waiting for us. It took some maneuvering so we could stay hooked up and open the slide without crashing into a tree. Our tires were just on the edge of the pavement but the slide opened o.k. and we were able to get leveled. An unfortunate mouse was flattened by the trailer tires, he should have been sleeping somewhere. We landed about 4 mountain time and had gone 145 miles and are just west of Troy, MT.

We spent the evening enjoying the light on the water (what there was through the smoke, light I mean), trains and watching a crazy boater struggling to motor his way up river…had to take a few stabs at it from different directions through the rapids. So much for peacefulness, there was a train track following the river across the canyon; at least he didn’t have to toot his horn! We were able to eat our dinner outside…heavenly!