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Published: August 17th 2012
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6th August ’12 Fort McCloud to Whitefish, Montana, USA.
After our sneak look at the Mounted Police show in the Fort we set off for the border crossing, which was out on its own in the middle of nowhere. There was quite a queue for the one booth that was open – I guess this was due to the Bank Holiday also.
Everything went ok until the officer asked us when we were leaving the US, when we said we had a flight booked for the 22nd he pointed out that our visas run out on the 2nd September, oh dear! We were then told to park up and go inside……….. as it turns out we just had to pay 6 dollars each, fill out a form and we got a new visa until November. This did save us from being arrested on the 22nd for overstaying our visa! The officer also asked us lots of questions about when we were last in the UK and how come we got so much time off work! – I think this was just envy rather than anything else.
Anyway we got back into the States again and had another long
drive ahead of us. We were travelling through the Rockies so the scenery was beautiful, it was a lovely sunny day with wide, big, blue Montana skies.
Our route took us through Glacier National Park and we drove the Going-to-the-sun road from Saint Mary right across to Apgar on the other side. Passing waterfalls, lakes, forest, mountains and glaciers (sound familiar??). According to the information board I read there will be no glaciers left in this area by 2030 and today there are only 26 out of the 150 recorded in 1850, so that’s a sobering thought.
The traffic was unreal, it seems everybody has come out for a drive today! There were lots of bikers cruising along in the sun and the ‘Roughnecks’ appeared to be having a club outing. We also enountered bus-fulls of Amish people having a day out.
All this traffic made parking at the viewpoints very hit and miss and we did indeed have to miss a couple of places out. Then we got caught in a very slow moving line of traffic due to road works. All this aside it was a fabulous park and made me remember just how fantastic
American National Parks are and how much I enjoyed them last year. (When it was all new and fresh to me and I wasn’t so jaded!)
We reached Whitefish and stayed at the Sleepcheap Motel!! Actually it wasn’t all that cheap and better than the name suggests. They had a folder of restaurant menus and spotting steak at a reasonable price we drove into town to find Quickies. It described itself as serving British Pub food ha ha. Anyway the food was great and for the first time in ages I actually felt as if I had eaten a proper meal.
We then had a walk around the town, which was a nice little place with ‘old’ wooden buildings and plaques telling you what was originally in the shops.
Then it was back to the Sleepcheap and a couple of episodes of Buried Alive – think Kim and Aggie’s show but taken to the extreme!
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