Destiny reared its head today and delivered a toothsome nibble on the Odyssey's collective posterior. The net result? We're not quite in Glacier National Park. We're also not quite sure we qualify as 'Extreme,' today, staying as we are in a little cabin in St. Mary's, Montana. Lemme tell you a little bit about it.
It all started innocently enough. We had a little wine, cheese, and apples last night in our campground in Banff, and were up and at 'em early for the day's adventures. Still mildly perturbed at the Acoustic Koupler, we broke camp and headed for the Surly One's internet workstations in Banff to get our email and hit the road for Calgary. All went smoothly, and before you could recite the Song of Hiawatha three times in odd meter, we were careening down the highway for Calgary, home of the Calgary Cannons, former Triple A farm club for the Seattle Mariners.
But I'm pretty sure I digress.
In preparation for the return to work next week, we decided it would be good
to try some actual typing whilst Otto was underway. You can see me trying it there at the right,
answering emails as
Otto burns up the pavement. The best part of that shot, however, is how Kristanne took it while
she was driving. See, instead of a traditional viewfinder like those you'd find on
a 35mm camera, the digital camera uses a big LCD panel. You don't put your eye up
to it -- what you see on the panel is what you get in your picture. So, Kristanne
just held up the camera pointing at me and read the LCD panel in the rearview mirror!
Pretty smart, eh? Yeah, I thought so, too. Anyway, it's also the Extreme Shot of the Day,
so please enjoy it.
You're probably saying to yourself, "Gee, that seems pretty early for the Extreme Shot of the Day. And that looks like an awful lot of boring text down there without any pretty pictures. What the heck is going on?"
Therein, as they say, lies the rub. And frankly, it's giving me a bit of a rash. Leaving Calgary, you see, the digital camera ran out of batteries. This was our backup set of batteries, too. I know, I know -- get another set, right? Not so easy. The digital camera uses special longlife rechargeable batteries, and they are a little bit expensive. That's why we brought the King Godzilla turbo recharger that can breathe life into a battery's discharged wasteland faster than you can say "April is the cruelest month." It's a great recharger and we love it a lot. Unfortunately, though, it only runs off 110 volt AC, and Otto only has that when he's plugged into a shoreline outlet. We were hosed, and we pretty much knew it.
We needed a pick-me-up, and we got it in Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, which as you can probably guess from the name alone, is pretty much the coolest thing ever. It's a museum on an archaeological site where for thousands of years, Plains Indians have purposely stampeded buffalo over a cliff to harvest their meat and hides. Great place. I'd like to show you pictures, but, again, the digital camera...I can't talk about it anymore.
Finally, we headed on to Glacier National Park in Montana. Amazing scenery driving in, but then, the Rockies seem to be full of that. We pulled up to the park entrance, only to be greeted by a sign informing us that the Going-to-the-Sun Road was closed 14 miles in. This road spans the entire park for a length of 52 miles and is supposed to be just amazing, so we were a bit bummed to find it was still closed for the season. We both blamed me, since I didn't do all I could to melt the snow. I apologize to everyone for that. I promise to do better next time.
In any case, since the two campgrounds in Glacier that were open didn't feature electrical hookups, and we literally needed to recharge our batteries, we decided to stay in a little cabin on the edge of Glacier. Our only problem is what next? We had allotted a couple days for Glacier, but now that's not going to happen. Me, I'm thinking we head down to some of the spring creeks in Montana where melting snow runoff will not be a problem for fishing and see if we can't catch the Odyssey's first trout. Kristanne is battling off a cold, so it might be good to stay in one place for a while, do a little relaxing. As always, send us your thoughts and suggestions!
Total Miles for 6\5 = 326