Day 365: One Year on the Road!

Happy Anniversary!  We left Calgary this morning and drove South towards the US border.  The terrain here is flat and planted with vast fields of canola:

Day365_01

After a 30 minute wait in line, we crossed into the US!  We enjoyed our two months in Canada and Alaska, but we’re all very happy to be back in the continental US.  Continuing South, we arrived at the visitor center for Glacier National Park:

Day365_02

The kids worked on the Junior Ranger program here:

Day365_03

And received their badges:

Day365_04

Like our rush through the Canadian Rockies, we would have loved to have spent a couple days in Glacier. We are somewhat pressed for time between now and M’s Bar Mitzvah in mid-September, and wildfires are obscuring the views here anyway, so we didn’t linger.  I really wanted to ride the going-to-the-sun road, but there’s nine miles of gravel surface during this phase of road repair, with significant delays to transit, so we will have to tour Glacier in a more in-depth way some other time.  The smoke from forest fires in Washington state made it hard to see much of anything:

Day365_05

From higher up, we could look down into Glacier’s glacier carved valleys:

Day365_06

As we drove around the South side of the park, we encountered a train pulling hundreds of tanker cars:

Day365_07

We intended to overnight at the Walmart of Missoula tonight, but I discovered during a bathroom stop that our rear passenger wheel had a broken leaf in its leaf spring, probably caused by the stress brought on by the leaf spring bolt failure we had in Alaska. I pounded the broken leaf back into place, and we drove to the much closer Lowes of Kalispell where we’re staying the night.  See the trip map for driving details.

Day 364: Calgary Heritage Park
Day 366: Leaf spring replacement

2 thoughts on “Day 365: One Year on the Road!

Leave a Reply to Ben Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *