Day 3

Day 3

July 4th, we woke up in St Regis slowly.  The campground was beautiful in the morning.  Last night's Independence Eve revelling in neighboring campsites seemed to have led to much sleeping in.  The birds and occasional car were about all that could be heard.  

The kids explored the "buildings" in a reconstructed mining village that had been installed near the street to uphold the Nugget in the campground name.  One of the buildings was original (The Assayer's Office) and had the historic register plaque to prove it.  The others seemed to have been built of weathered wood and looked no less old.  There was a jail, a school, a hotel, and a brothel.  We got a nice picture of the kids looking out the window of the brothel.

Brothel paragraph:  The brothel in the reconstructed village reminded me that the day before we had seen a brothel museum in Pendleton (it was closed, perhaps because it was Sunday) and had also driven past Wallace Idaho with its Oasis Brothel Museum, which Olivia and I had visited on a previous trip.  It seems to me that either brothels were far more popular in the Northwest than the rest of the country, that the movement to recognize sex workers has really made some great strides, or that, on our trip, we had a surprising set of coincidental run-ins with solitary purveyors of brothel pride.  

Coffee Geek paragraph:  I decided I wanted to drink good coffee on the trip and collected some essentials for the trip.  I brought some relatively fresh full city roast Guatemalan beans.  I made coffee using a Hario handgrinder purchased for the trip and I brought a Hario cup top coffee dripper that I brought because it's bigger than the Cafex one I would usually use and, even if it may be more breakable, I thought it might be easier.  (I'm not sure it was.)  I just boiled water in a sauce pan and poured from that.  I wondered about water temperature.  I've heard that 200 degrees is ideal for coffee, I wonder what the elevation at this place is and what the boiling temperature of water at this elevation is.  It could be that some elevations are ideal for coffee.  I wondered if I was at it.  In any case the coffee tasted good.

Back to the morning...  

After exploring the buildings, finding half a deer's jawbone, and a quick breakfast of cold cereal, the kids were desperate to go in the pool.  Between the pool, the showers, and a bike ride through the grounds, we were pretty much leaving right at (or after) the edge of acceptability.  We asked for a late check out anyway.  The folks were nice about it.  

We headed north from St Regis to Glacier after we stopped at a small grocer in town to buy a few things.  At the St Regis crossroads, there seemed to be some kind of fair or something, maybe a horse auction.

We used the Garmin to get up there and it was pretty good.  The Garmin directions weren't far from the Google Maps directions and most differences were just when the names of the streets were different (Main St vs. Rte. 66, kind of thing).  It was interesting to note that they were different at all though.  Different names and algorithms, I guess.  It does bring a bit of nervousness, though.  

The road up to Flathead Lake (in the middle of the trip to Glacier) leads you through some beautiful mountains.   Driving alongside Flathead Lake had both beauty and lots of people.  We were definitely in vacation territory.  From the north end of the Lake, we still had a ways to go to get to Glacier but the mountains seemed to be right there and the trip didn't take much time but seemed forever because it seemed like it would be plenty nice to camp right where we were.  

We finally got to Glacier and had dinner at a restaurant in Apgar Village.  It was pretty much high end diner food and was good.  It was apparent that huckleberries are the big local food.  We saw lots of signs about huckleberries through the drive and the menu had several items including huckleberry.  I had a salad with huckleberry dressing and a decent pale ale (Going to the Sun Pale Ale).  Olivia and Ailsa had trout with huckleberry sauce.  Tallis had an emu burger, which tasted surprisingly like a hamburger.  When Ailsa surrendered her trout after just a little bit, I ate that and ordered and a huckleberry riesling wine.  Tasty.

From there, we found our campground not far from MacDonald Lake with lots of individual camp sites but ours was up on a rise and seemed to be almost by itself.  After we unlocked the bikes, the kids asked to ride around the camp site.  Olivia and I set up the canopy, got everything set up, and we all walked to a ranger led talk about Glacier that was held in an amphitheater next to the campground.  This was going to be the first step in the kids getting Junior Ranger badges.  The mosquitos were hellacious.  Afterwards, we walked back to the site and crashed.