Big Sky Country

Day 7, Monday August 25.

We slept well our second night in Jackson Hole and really liked our Supermarket host but decided it was time to move on. Before we did though, we took advantage of a laundromat called the missing sock right across from the supermarket. Bambi did the wash while I... well, I guess I was sleeping yet. But in my defense, I had to stay up really late the night before blogging to keep you all up to date on our adventure. I did get up and straighten up the trailer and help Bambi fold and put clothes away and we were off.

We had read in a brochure that a place called the Teton Steakhouse in Jackson was advertising a $5.95 breakfast buffet and free WiFi. Lets see... you're saying that I can blog, check email, AND eat my weight in sausage gravy??? Well now, that's a deal!!

I always laugh when I get to go to a breakfast buffet and Bambi suggests to me as I'm coming back with like my third plate of biscuits, eggs, hashbrowns and sausage... all covered in gravy, and she says "Oh, did you see that really good looking fruit selection?" "You like fruit right?" Sure, I like fruit ok - if it was the only thing on the buffet... but if you think I'm going to waste perfectly good stomach space on fruit when it could be filled with biscuits and gravy... How long have we known each other?? That's why Kyle and I do buffets so well together, we've learned over the years to skip the salad and bread (the cheap stuff). If you're really going to put it to 'em, you've got to hit them at the meat section...wow, I' shouldn't have had those last two brats!! (Sorry Jason, I just had to put it in there somewhere)

Anywho... back to our little story in Jackson. After a really nice breakfast, Bambi decided to stay at the restaurant and utilize the WiFi while I took the truck and trailer to get fuel and to give them both a good wash. At this point, we'd been gone for a good week and the truck was getting a little funky too. Then we drove over to a Jackson community rec center that had an indoor swimming pool. In another brochure Bambi was reading (and she reads them all), she saw that visitors could pay a daily use fee to use the facility which included full locker rooms and showers. When we went in, we told the kid we'd like two day passes but that we were just going to shower so he let us in for free which was pretty cool. Either that or he could smell us standing across the counter, knew that we'd just spent the night in a parking lot and just showed us some Christian compassion... either way it felt good to be clean again.

We spent our last hour or two in Jackson just browsing through the shops again and picked up a couple of jackets for Bambi. Knowing we were headed North, we figured it was a safe bet to have a few more layers.

From Jackson we had a decision to make. Go back up through Idaho and back into Northern Montana directly to Glacier National Park, or take a detour to the West and go see Coeur d'Alene Idaho. See, a few months ago, we got an email from Bambi's cousin Kyle saying that he has registered for the full Ironman in Coeur d'Alene and sent us a link to the website. We looked it over and had never heard of Coeur d'Alene (or CDA as the locals abreviate it). Judging by the pictures on the website, we couldn't tell where it was. It looked as though it could be in France or Switzerland or something. The website showed a beautiful hotel on the side of a crystal clear lake, surrounded by mountains. When we found out it was in Northern Idaho, we decided it should make our list of places to see sometime. However, we knew that we wanted to go to Glacier and CDA was 2-3 days out of the way. Oh well, you only go around once right... we decided to see CDA and we were not disappointed. More on CDA later.

We headed back up past Yellowstone and decided to stay the night in Butte Montana. Now I have to say, we've seen some desolate areas of country but the drive from Jackson to Butte has to be one of the most sparsly populated areas in the country. They do have speed limits in Montana now but I think they are more like "suggestions" because there is just nothing for miles and miles...vast expanses of nothing. Every once in a while, you'd hit a small little town that offers gas or some food but even there, several of the exits say the name of the town and under it "no services." Not the kind of place where you want to push your luck on the gas gauge because it could be 70 miles before your next gas stop. Luckily we had our bikes along in the trailer so if we ran out of fuel, Bambi could always just peddal her little self to the next town with a gas can and get us fixed right up...lol, just kidding!!

Anyway, we finally made it to Butte. I have to say, we've seen some nice towns on this trip but Butte MT is not one of them. We finally did find a place to sleep (in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn with a 24 hour Perkins attached) but I didn't really feel safe like I had the previous two nights in Jackson. I'm sure there are decent places in Butte but it just struck me that this was an old mining town. The next day as we were leaving in the daylight, we could see the evidence of the mining. The story goes that the city of Butte was built upon a hill which was found to have an expansive copper seam directly underneath it. The city still sits on a hill, but half of the hill is gone and is replaced by a massive quarry or hole where they had strip mined the entire side of the hill way down into the earth. The story goes on to say that the hill was the most expensive hill in Montana as the copper found there, helped produce phone and electrical wire during the early days of the US industrial revolution. I don't really know much more about Butte but I wasn't exactly in the mood to stick around and learn more either.

One thing I can say, they call it big sky country for a reason. As I was driving across the state, I had plenty of time to look up (especially as there is long distances where there is nothing else to look at). The sky is truly beautiful and we have marveled again and again as we were in the state that, especially at night when the stars are out, the sky seems to stretch on forever. I've seen some really clear nights in Iowa and Minnesota where you can really see some stars. But the nights that we spent in Montana were really impressive as you feel like you could just reach up and touch them. If you take some time to look, you can see the hand of God all around you in the beauty of this country.