Glacier National Park 9/20/18

FINALLY! I made it to my first national park! (which was the main objective of this trip in the first place – to visit national parks!!).

I asked Liz if she’d mind driving since I’ve been driving solo for over 3 weeks. Above is our first view as we left in the a.m. And this is MKR sitting on my lap in the passenger seat!

This next part is really difficult because there were so many absolutely magnificent and majestic pictures to choose from.
 
This first set is from a river we stopped by (just cuz) which is the kind of thing I’d been wanting to do all along on this trip, but I was busy either problem-solving van issues, waiting for repairs or trying to get somewhere quickly for one reason or another. But that shit is over!

So here we are lolly-gagging by this beautiful river. I was really struck by the wide variety of colors of the stones. There were so many beautiful stones and I filled the pocket of my hoody with them. Most of them have some kind of stripes on them and I felt drawn to them.

Speaking of my hoody, I realized the night before this that I left behind (somewhere) all of my warm clothing! I took everything out of the camper to inventory what I had, as well as to rearrange it to make it easier for both Liz and I in the camper. No warm clothing! It could either be in the van, the hotel room in Arizona, the rental car from Arizona, the Holbrook Shuttle that took me to rent the car, or at Tim and Heidi’s Hideaway. Ugh! More on that later…

The approach to the park, and me getting my National Parks pass!

The park…
 
We took Going to the Sun Road, which just opened again this past week due to the fires. (apologies for dirty windshield marks, there will be a lot of those!)

Liz says those trees along the horizon make the earth look like a porcupine :-)

Look at these colors!

We kept seeing these people (mostly in small groups) riding around on these old timey motorcycles. Liz did a little research and found out it's a motorcycle club whose members must drive bikes that are older than 1929 (yes, that's 1929!) and they go on adventures around the country.

 And It rained on and off while we were driving through Glacier. I think the raindrops on the window add to this picture. Oh - and btw, Liz was driving this whole time THANK GOD! There were some really scary places on the road where the edge of the road was a figgin' cliff! That stuff makes me really nervous and I would have been driving about 2 mph if I had been behind the wheel! And I probably would have needed a diaper!

This is the KOA near Glacier where we stayed, look at the (faint) rainbow that welcomed us!