Jay at the Cabin Grill

    Back at the motel, we sat out on a picnic table beside the lake with Dave and the owner swapping travel stories and listening to the owner regale us with lists of the animals he’d killed in the area.  I went to bed early.

    The next morning Jay and I were ready to go at daylight but there was no sign of life from Dave’s room so we headed out on our own again.  The road down to the only border crossing followed a lakefront, winding in and out of the shoreline.  The sun was to our right, coming through the trees like a strobe light, making the curves somewhat surreal.  At the town of Newport, we found ourselves in Idaho with no formal announcement that the border had been crossed.  Breakfast was at the Riverfront Café, oddly enough right on the river, where we learned all about the robbery at the restaurant (“an inside job!”), the waitresses’s impending retirement and her plans for the big trip in the camper.

    We rode on down route 2 to Sandy Point and picked up 200 south around Lake Pend Oreille into the mountains, then back north on 56 for spectacular views of mountains and lakes and forest.  The pine forest came back, though not entirely successfully, with brown hills peeking through.

    Leaving Newport we followed Route 2 along the Priest river and a lake down into a low valley. As we neared Montana, the valley opened up into the wide grassy bottom, hemmed in by tall mountains that we’ve all seen in the movies.  There should have been a wagon train on the trail, with a tall, square-jawed hero in the saddle of a great brown horse, out in front leading the way.  Instead, there were campers and pickups and the occasional motorcycle, going about the rather ordinary business of us modern humans.

    not exactly Ward Bond

or Clint Eastwood, either

public TV artist's dreamy version

    We made our first pie stop of the day in Libby, Montana, where I also wanted to buy another layer for warmth.  It being August, I hadn’t given enough thought to the temperature changes that come with altitude and lattidtue.  We found the imaginatively named Libby Café with a pie case well stocked and a helpful young waitress who told us she’d moved there from North Carolina.  “I didn’t realize that what we had down there weren’t mountains until I moved here,” she said.   A selection of pie slices became our lunch, including hackleberry, a local delicacy which must be picked wild and reportedly cannot be cultivated.

 
trigger hand goes in, lookout keeps the motors running

    Leaving town I noticed that there were several casinos along the main street but none of them had any cars in the parking lots.  I saw this in several other towns we passed through until we got into more “touristy” areas, but no one could offer a good explanation for the absence of gambling customers.  Apparently the casinos never close, so that wasn’t the reason.  Have hard times hit the recession-proof gambling industry?

    Also of note in Libby, a business with a large sign advertising its two specialties: "Gifts" and "Irrigation."  I was trying to think of the last time I considered giving someone an irrigation system for that special occasion, and if one would, how should it be wrapped?

    We made our way up through Kalispell, a name that just seems to have some true western cachet about it, to Whitefish, where we found a room for the night.  Our hotel, the Downtowner, had seen better days a long time ago, but met our requirements of being relatively clean, quite cheap and within walking distance of a restaurant with beer.

another luxurious lodging

    Our first stop for the evening was the Great Northern Brewery, where we sat at the second floor bar looking out the glass front over the main street.  We tried a flight of samples, each finding some he liked (usually not the same ones, though the Frog Hop Pale Ale was a winner) and definitely agreeing on one neither of us found appealing. For my admittedly non-universal taste, the Pack String Porter was the best on offer.  (When asked about the significance of the name, the bartender said, “They just made it up.”)  Thus fortified, we wandered on down the street, finally settling on “Lattitude 48," an eclectic little restaurant with a varied menu.  The food was excellent and they also had a decent beer and wine selection.  We were sufficiently sated that even I couldn't go for dessert.

    Back at the motel, we met up with a group of a half-dozen or so Harleys and their riders just checking in.  They had Illinois plates, but apparently had trucked the bikes to somewhere nearer the west and were riding from there.  We talked to some of them about their machines and their travels, and realized later that none of them had expressed any interest in the two old Beemers or where we might be going.

    The next morning, Tuesday, we headed out at first light for Glacier.  We stopped in the town of West Glacier, the gateway to the park, for breakfast.  A couple pulled in, each on a bike, with the man of the pair wearing a ventilated jacket.  Jay and I looked at the various layers we had on and concluded that either we have become wimps or he was just a mutant impervious to cold. Still no definitive answer to that question.

    Into the park, paying heed to all the signs warning us not to feed, or become food for, the bears, and then onto the “Going to the Sun” road.  I’d heard about this road all my adult life and was expecting something remarkable.  For the first several miles, it was pretty, following the glacial lakes and the stream, high mountains in front of us lit by the rising sun, but it was just a pretty mountain road. 

Going to the Sun, but not quite there yet    

    Then it began to climb.  And climb.  We ran into several spots of construction where the pavement had been stripped down to bare earth and the traffic stop delays gave us a chance to get off the bikes and look around.  The road is cut, literally, into the side of the mountains like a goat track circling a hillside.  There is a low rock wall, not really enough to keep a car from going over and nothing that would offer much impediment to a bike headed off the edge.  And if one did so, the rider would have a lot of time to think about it before hitting anything on the way down.

large old man in front of even larger, older valley

   It’s cliche to say that it looked like the view from an airplane, but like many cliches, there is an element of truth.