Congrats to everyone for finding this blog! My plane leaves in about 6 hours and I've just finished packing. As I type this my mother is baking me a farewell pumpkin pie, which will help me survive the next 3 days of planes and hotels before I find myself in Mombasa, Kenya (thank you mom!). Please let everyone you think would be interested know about this blog and I'll try to update it as often as I can. My time for sending out invites is a little crunched, thanks. Now for pie and bed, enjoy the snow everyone in Missoula! Tor [View Full Entry]

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Missoula We traveled from Seattle to Missoula, looooooong drive. Washington is like the prairies, goes on forever. We stopped in Ellensburg, went shopping at the Goodwill LOL We are living LARGE lol Natalie found some brand new underwear still in the plastic lol showed them to me and I bought a couple too lol She was tickled to have found them, we went there to find some bowls so we could have brekky in the rooms lol getting into the swing of traveling :) Also we had our usual Saturday in Missoula. We found an Ihop, it was great! dare [View Full Entry]

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Montana Fun: Missoula and more The ride through Montana very quickly became beautiful. What they say about Big Sky is true. When you get to the top of the plateaus, as you are driving through the eastern part of the state all of a sudden the sky is truly enormous. It’s gorgeous. There is a lot of stuff happening on the top of some of those plateaus! Some people set up huge working farms on the top of the plateaus. So as you drive through the eastern part of the state you are going across giant plateaus, and then down and [View Full Entry]

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Today is the official half-way point of our trip!!! We've driven over 5500 miles! We drove from Oregon to Montana, today. We drove 550 miles with multiple stops making our trip 10 hours long. (That's about how long it takes to fly to Brazil.) For the first two hours of our trip, we were driving next to the Columbia River. We drove past a wildfire that was on the side of the highway, with firefighters trying to put it out in the desert. Then we went towards Spokane which is the city where our close family friend, Dave Gipstein, lived as [View Full Entry]

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Montana is coming to an end. We have all had such a lovely time up here in the boondocks and it seems longer than a week as time moves by very slowly in the woods and the sun finally sets near 10pm. The drive out here was long, but we did not want to drive much at night to stay safe and we switched, Ken and I, so that nobody would be too tired. Saturday evening we arrived to my dads house in Utah to stay the night, it was a nice but short visit as we left Sunday about 11am [View Full Entry]

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Well, I'm writing this as I'm sitting in the waiting room of the Chevy dealer here in Missoula at 1:00 PM. It's a beautiful dealership, but it could use a Bloody Mary bar in the waiting room. On the way here, the truck kept giving a "Service Engine Soon" warning so I brought it here to be checked out. It turned out I was getting a misfire and they are putting new spark plugs and plug wires in it to the tune of $450. In the old days, I'd put a set of spark plugs in the old '71 Torino and [View Full Entry]

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The day dawned with a little more cloud than we have seen to date but still plenty of sun around too.Made our own breakfast in the downstairs kitchen and prepared for the day ahead. We planned to get into Montana,the Big Sky country and that meant a 200 mile drive. We continued our way on ID-93 and shortly after leaving Challis came across a wagon and horses being driven by a guy who liked an old time prospector.We then travelled into another gorge with the Salmon River on one side and towering cliffs all around so a photo was in order.As [View Full Entry]

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What's hot: Interstate 90. What's not: The return drive. Travel lesson of the day: There’s more to see! from Kathy: As we drove away from the boat at 10 a.m., Paul said, “Goodbye, Pacific Ocean.” It brought a touch of mortality to this trip, for most of which I’ve been in a state of never-endingness. With this goodbye, I realize we are now turning back towards home. Now we are on Rt. 90 W in Seattle, WA, which will take us halfway across the country. We already have about 5,150 miles on the trip [View Full Entry]

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Blog from Rachel: We got up early and left Glacier for our 7 hour drive to Yellowstone. We broke up the trip by stopping in the city of Missoula to visit the University of Montana, home of the fighting grizzlie bears…the 1995 and 2001 division 1-AA champions in football. We all got Montana Griz sweatshirts…… except for dad!!!!!! He regrets his decision greatly. It’s a very nice campus except for the fact that it is haunted. I bought a book about Montana ghost stories and many of them take place on the University of Montana campus. There are many rooms and [View Full Entry]

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We are now in Missoula, Montana, but let me bring you up to date on our adventures since our last entry. We traveled north along the Oregon Coast and then followed the Columbia River Gorge east. We stopped in Hood River which is the sail and kite boarding capitol of the US. When we arrived it was quite cold and very windy, but the next morning it was beautiful. We visited the local historical museum which was quite interesting and then spent a good part of the morning driving the "Fruit Loop." This is a beautiful 35 mile loop drive through [View Full Entry]

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