Road_Schoolin

North Dakota caught us by surprise.  It was a state that we never really had on our list of visiting, but when we looked at the map and the location of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, it just made sense on our way east.  It took us two days to get across Montana, which was partly due to a major windstorm coming off the east side of the Rockies.  It was blowing 35-45 consistently with gusts in the mid 60’s and felt a bit dangerous pulling a large sail behind us.  In fact, we saw one high profile delivery truck coming down the highway at us at a 30 degree lean with it’s inside tires just barely touching the ground.  We didn’t catch the news that evening, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if a few lightweight, high profile vehicles might have been tossed off the road.  We pulled into the Lewistown, MT Kiwanis RV (thank you Campendium) wayside, thankful to still have all ten of our tires securely on the ground.  The Kiwanis park is a free roadside “RV P...

Glacier was a new National Park and experience for all four of us.  A park that we have heard grandeurs about from other travellers, family and friends.  Our original plan was to spend some time in Glacier and then travel north to Canada into Waterton National Park, Banff and Lake Louise. Due to COVID (and possibly Canandians not wanting anything to do with Americans anymore), the border is still closed to leisure travel.  This gave us four to five nights to spend in and around the park, which felt like plenty to explore and get a good feel for the majesty around us. Based on some recommendations by Jill Harrell (Kieren’s 3th grade teacher and now Maren’s Oregon Family School coordinator), we headed up to the less visited NW part of the park on a 40 mile bumpy, gravel road.  Our first stop was the isolated and nearly 100 year old Polebridge Mercantile, reportedly Montana’s best bakery and home of the Huckleberry Bear Claw.  This place was no secret and it seems ...

After a relative short drive from Sandpoint, Idaho to Glacier National Park in the northwest part of Montana, we rolled into the quaint little “town” of West Glacier and site #84 in West Glacier RV Park.  I say town in quotation marks because West Glacier appears to be a town owned by one concessionaire.  There is a cafe, a small market, a food truck and a very cool new miniature golf course that all have the same colors and motif.  Our campground was just down the road and follows true to that same palate and feel as the other buildings in West Glacier town.  The sites in our campground were huge and this appeared to be a place for full timers and big rigs.  I would say nearly ¾’s of the RV’s in this campground were giant class A’s and large 5th wheels’ like ourselves.  One giant bus just down the road from ours looked like a tour bus for Coldplay with its all black exterior, tinted windows, four AC units on the roof and a matching 25 foot black sprinter v...

 And away we go.....the last few weeks have been a bit hectic getting ready to hit the road.  There was moving out of our Bend home, moving into our 5th wheel, prepping for a year of road schoolin, and getting a business ready to operate semi-autonomously for eight months.  But after all that, we are indeed on the road and now writing this post from Sandpoint, Idaho.   We would like to thank our good friends Jay and Rachel for letting us crash at their east Bend home RV pad and letting us ease into the RV lifestyle.  And after a few days at my parent's home in Sisters while the RV had a few minor repairs completed we rolled out of town on September 10th for our first two nights in Walla Walla, Washington.  A town we absolutely love and actually used to own a home in . We signed up for  Harvest Hosts  a few months ago and got to spend our first night at Isenhower Cellars .  Turns out the owner, Denise, was our realtor when we sold our Wal...