Back Home

After almost 8,000 miles in 5 weeks, we're happy to be home again. The scenery and history of the areas we visited continues to impress us, but it's nice to settle down with familiar surroundings as well.

The map above shows our approximate path; specifically, our overnight stops brought us through:
In Ontario: Ottawa, North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay
Duluth, Minnesota
Grand Forks and Williston, North Dakota
Havre, Hungry Horse, Kalispell, and St. Mary's, Montana
Waterton, Alberta
Canmore, Golden, Kamloops, Squamish, and Vancouver, British Columbia
Port Angeles, La Push, and Coulee City, Washington
St. Regis, Missoula, Billings and Glendive, Montana
Detroit Lakes, Minnesota
Iron Mountain and Midland, Michigan
Canandaigua, New York

We asked eachother which we enjoyed the most and were hard pressed to come up with one answer: the beauty is in the vastness of the U.S. (and Canada), and the diversity found within.

Rolling Home

After a visit in Midland, Michigan with old friends (and former Connecticut neighbors), we were ready this morning to start the final stretch towards home. Two more uneventful border crossings got us into Sarnia, Ontario from Port Huron, MI, and back into the States at Niagara.

The day was totally uneventful except for an inadvertent detour into a closed rest area along Canada's highway 402: following a construction truck, we couldn't see the "closed" sign until it was too late. With no place to turn around our back out, our rest stop consisted of waiting and watching while the truck was loaded with fill from the site.

The Upper Peninsula

Although the national parks are pretty much behind us as we head home, there are still so many remarkable places to see along the way.
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We had never travelled into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, so we enjoyed the drive Saturday and Sunday, especially the stretch across the northern coast of Lake Michigan from Escanaba to St. Ignace Michigan, and across the Mackinac Bridge to Mackinaw City (please don't ask me to explain why some places go by the name of Mackinaw instead of Mackinac!).

The five mile long Mackinac Bridge was completed in 1957; prior to that, the access between the upper and lower portions of Michigan was either via ferry or by land through Illinois and Wisconsin.

Oh - and yes, there really is a place named Land-O-Lakes in Wisconsin!

Bismarck and Fargo

No national parks Friday, just an eastward progression towards home. However, having stayed near Bismarck, North Dakota overnight, we decided to take a detour through the grounds of the state capitol. The large park surrounding the capitol and adjacent North Dakota Heritage Center is lovely, although we have to admit the capitol building itself, the tallest building in the city, seems to us to resemble a grain elevator. The park has several bronze statues, including one dedicated to Sakakawea (THEIR spelling and one of many spellings we’ve seen for the name of the famous Shoshone woman who served as a guide for the Lewis and Clark expedition).






















A drive through Fargo (how many of you have been there?) and next door Moorhead, Minnesota capped our day.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota encompasses the North Dakota Badlands and is within the Little Missouri National Grasslands. The Park is a tribute to the 26th president's dedication to conservation.

As to be expected, wildlife is abundant in the Park - most noticeably prairie dogs and bison.



We also caught just a glimpse of some of the wild horses roaming through the park, but were too slow to get any but a distant photo of any of them.

Of course, the scenery itself was worth the visit:

The (somewhat commercial) town of Medora, ND, is just at the entrance of the southern portion of the Park, and Gracie and Abby were all too happy to take a stroll through town.

Montana: Billings and Little Big Horn

Billings, Montana was named after Frederick Billings, who was president of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the early 1880's at the time that the town was established along the railroad's route. Mr. Billings was a native of Royalton and Woodstock Vermont, and is the "Billings" of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park in Woodstock (a plug for the only national park in Vermont - http://www.nps.gov/mabi/index.htm, at which Chris has volunteered for several years).
On display in the National Park mansion's library is a small 18-20" statue of Mr. Billings, which we had been told is a model of the full-sized version to be found in the city of Billings. Locating that statue in the city of Billings became our mission.


We saw a number of statues in town, but sadly, when we inquired about the location of the Billings statue, we were first met with "I'm not sure - who did you say he was?".



However, with the help of a KOA clerk we were able to locate it on a city map in front of the Western Heritage Center on Montana Avenue.





We were delighted to find out that the Western Heritage Center is also the former Parmly Billings Library, donated in 1900 by the Billings family in honor Frederick's eldest son Parmly (1863-1888).
The library was slated for the wrecking ball in 1967, but the city chose to preserve the building in its current incarnation as the Heritage Center, and the Laurance Rockefeller family (Laurance's wife Mary was Frederick Billing's grand-daughter) provided for the update of the building's landscaping in 1993.




















Later the same morning, we visited the Little Big Horn National Monument - the site of Custer's Last Stand on June 25, 1876 against a combined force of Northern Plains Indian tribes. As per the National Park flyer, "Although the Indians won the battle, they subsequently lost the war against the military's effors to end their independent, nomadic way of life....The tribes [subsequently] scattered... and most... returned to the reservations and surrendered in the next few years".


The memorial equally honors all that fell in the battle - Custer's battalion as well as the Native Americans, making the point that all fought and died defending their known way of life.

R & R

Gracie & Abby in St. Regis, Montana

We took a breather from all of the driving over the last couple of days as we stopped for two nights in Missoula, Montana to rendezvous with friends Jan and Sharon who were in town visiting their son.
Missoula is a city of roughly 60,000 and seems a very bicycle- and pedestrian- friendly city, with a long recreation path along the Clark Fork River, which passes close to the center of town.
We took advantage of the weather and attended an outdoor Missoula Symphony concert downtown.
On Monday, we all drove up to Lolo Pass on the Montana/Idaho border – the pass where the Lewis and Clark expedition crossed the Bitterroot Mountains in September of 1805.

The Rest of Washington State

We've mentioned the reasons we enjoy RV-ing more than once: it's not just the people we meet (other RV-ers as well as locals), but the opportunity to see the variety of terrain and life styles in the U.S., and to discover points of interest we would not otherwise have ever visited. A case in point is our trek eastward across the state of Washington in the last couple of days: on Friday, we woke up on a Pacific coast beach, but by evening had visited one of the premier sources of lavender in the U.S.,

had crossed the Cascade mountains
and the Wenachee valley with all of its irrigated apple orchards (on otherwise parched hillsides),
had climbed through seeming desert mesas to miles and miles of wheat fields at the elevation of 2500 feet,
and finally arrived at the Dry Falls of the Grand Coulee river in Coulee City, Washington - the remnants of an ice age waterfall that at 400 feet high and 3.5 miles wide would have dwarfed the 170 foot Niagara Falls.

Twilight Zone (The Olympic Peninsula - Ecosystem # 3)

Until a couple of days ago, the town of Forks, Washington represented nothing to us except that it was a spot on the map with a funny name that happened to be close to Olympic National Park. HA!
For the uninitiated (as we were), Forks and nearby La Push are the setting for Stephenie Meyers’ popular “Twilight” series of vampire-themed books – and therefore a mecca for fans of all ages and headquarters of all manner of souvenier shops and “Twilight” tours.

We didn’t have much of a choice of RV parks after touring Olympic NP’s Hoh Rain Forest, but managed to locate one right on the Pacific Coast at Rialto Beach in La Push (the park’s Third Ecosystem). We were happy when told over the phone that we’d have a site right on the ocean, so we headed out of Forks and towards the coast. As we made our way down route 110, we tried to ignore all of the vampire, werewolf, and “Twilight-zone” related references on signboards.
The waterfront turned out to be absolutely stunning, although somewhat fogged in.

The lack of WiFi or TV service was a minor nuisance, but what made us more uneasy was the fact that we were so far out (perhaps close to the western-most spot in the continental U.S.) that we had no cell or transistor radio service either – not to mention the posted tsunami warnings “in the event of an earthquake”. A perfect spot for vampires and werewolves indeed; maybe it’s time to start our way back east.

The Olympic Peninsula - Ecosystem # 2

The diversity of Olympic National Park became more apparent Thursday as we visited the Hoh Rain Forest – a place that gets an average of 140 inches of rain per year – approximately twice the rainfall of Seattle! Fortunately, July and August are the driest months, so the weather was perfect for hiking along some of the old-growth forest trails

"Mad About Victoria"

I had long thought that the 1960's Kinks song "Victoria" was about the city in British Columbia, mainly because the only lyrics I understood were "I was born, lucky me, in a land that I love..." and "...mad about Victoria, mad about Victoria...". I Google'd the song the other day and found out otherwise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_(song))....but I digress...

We took an express passenger ferry from Port Angeles Washington to Victoria on Wednesday and found a lovely, lovely city with many public gardens and year-round mild weather. It rests at the southern end of 300 mile-long Vancouver Island (not to be confused with the city of Vancouver), an island we decided we'll have to come back to visit more of some day.