Day 53 - Glacier National Park - Gardiner

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At some point in the night Mark and I got an unexpected wakeup call as we slept on the picnic tables, when the rain came. I woke up and quickly realised what was happening, and seeing Mark practically sprint to the van, I followed in pursuit, entering the van to discover we had woken Todd up very abruptly. For obvious reasons he didn’t look too pleased that he has been woken, and we both quickly settled down on a row each, before the van fell into silence again as we all got back to sleep.
Only problem was I’d set myself up in my sleeping bag the wrong way on the row. Whilst Todd and Mark were lying with their heads by the side of the van and their legs hanging over the aisle at the other end, I’d got my head on the seat next to the aisle, with my legs, and therefore the rest of my body, scrunched up against the other side.
Now that the other two had settled down, I didn’t want to disturb them by shuffling around, especially as Todd was woken up, so I slept curled up on a row of seats, which was not comfortable at all.
In the morning, I checked on my stuff that I stored under the picnic table I slept on briefly. Only my rucksack and the Indy hat really got drenched, but it was mainly the roll mat that I left behind as I scuttled to the van. At the moment I had decided that Mr Blue Sky would be put up and slept in every night for the rest of the Tour.

We were leaving Glacier behind and heading through the whole of Montana, which would have been nice to see, but a heavy rain storm thwarted that most of the way. We stopped for lunch at the edge of a park in Helena, the capital city of The Treasure State, after the rain had briefly subsided.

After lunch we hit the road to complete the rest of the long drive to Gardiner, just outside of Yellowstone National Park. Our camp site was a slightly cramped stretched area between the road leading to Yellowstone and river of the same name. When we pulled up we had the small grass area by one of the buildings on the site that had the laundry, toilet and washing facilities right by the bottom of the ramp down from the road. The rest of the site was dominated by huge RVs, and the only WIi-Fi connection, which would be the last we would have for 3 days, was at the other end of the site at the other building, but when I got there, there was none to be found.

After we struggled to set up camp, the wind was blowing mighty strong, even throwing us off our strides, Group C were preparing dinner, whilst the rest of us were taking in some laundry, or a shower, or pictures of the North Entrance to Yellowstone, the Gateway, which was in clear view from our tents. This was part of the trip that some people had been looking forward to, including myself a little, and you could feel the buzz and excitement as we chillaxed for a third straight night on the eve of entering the Park. Mark then started uploading other people’s photos onto his hard drive he bought. Once he was complete, I dod mine, and it took so long, that I ended up going to bed around 01.30ish!

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