Somerville to Seattle

  We made it home safe! Here were our stops on the way after Glacier: Butte, MT Billings, MT Bismark, ND Minneapolis, MN Chicago, IL  Clearfield, PA Somerville, MA Montana Tristan's road trip pro tips Nice views, but they say the speed limit on rt 90 is 80 mph when half of it is twisty mountain passes, and then it feels like they're doing road construction on all the flat bits. When they do road work they shut down an entire half of the highway and make everyone split the other direction with half of us driving the "wrong" way. There's wayyy too many stores/restaurants/motels with "Grizzly" in their name even though bears are  godless killing machines .  4 / 5 Stars North Dakota We hit the beginning of the Canada wildfire smoke in North Dakota. Tristan's road trip pro tips If you're trying to get from anywhere in the north-eastern half of the US, to anywhere in the north-western part of the country, I can't recommend North Dakota highly enoug...

 

If you are afraid of heights, Glacier is probably not the park for you. I now understand why they call the one road that runs through the park Going-to-the-Sun Road. And it's not because the road runs east to west like I thought. The first evening, instead of reaching for the skies, we stayed low by Lake McDonald for sunset. It was lovely except for one thing.  Unfortunately they are doing road construction all along that ten mile stretch where they turned it into a temporary dirt road. We found out the next morning that they wet it in the mornings, but apparently not in the evenings.  That foggy looking substance you see over the lake is actual dust from all the cars driving on the nearby road. Pretty. But also, yuck. Fortunately, things were  much clearer the next morning and thus began our assent up Going-to-the-Sun Road. I don't love heights, but I can tolerate them enough to enjoy the rush of not falling while imagining what it would be like if I did. This...

  We are officially on our way east. Making our way to one last National Park, Glacier, before coming home. The picture above is the west side of Washington in the raincloud region created by the mountains. The picture below is the east side of Washington, not in the raincloud region. See if you can spot the subtle differences. During our time on the west coast we watched the fire danger meters tick up from low to high. Here in the dry east side the fires have already started. As far as we could tell this was just dry grass that caught on fire. Thankfully it seemed pretty contained. No one appeared to be alarmed and we drove by it safely to our destination. But still, that was a lot of smoke. We were grateful to have our good old KN95s on hand. Sure feels like we are leaving the west coast at just the right time. It was only about 5 hours on the road from Seattle to Coeur D'Alene. Don't let the fancy name fool you, I can assure you the food is not. Next up, Glacier National Pa...