Four beautiful states in two wonderful days

A beautiful Washington road

    A trip through Washington, Idaho and part of Montana Thursday just reinforced what Joan and I already knew about our wonderful country. There is beauty almost anywhere (and everywhere)  you look. The mountains of Washington, Idaho and Montana were spectacular today.

    The weather was fair, although we ran into a few little squalls of rain and some harder rain. A little snow, a little sleet and the temperatures varied from a high of 58 at Moses Lake to a low of 35 in the mountains of Washington.

    Moses Lake had a special meaning for me although not an always pleasant one. Here's the rest of the story about why I should have been in Moses Lake many years before.

A snowy rest area in Montana

   In the late 1980s I covered a story for the Oakland Press about a young couple who robbed a Waterford Township gas station and killed the store clerk. It was a horrendous crime and the couple vanished after it.

    My story attracted the attention of a then popular true crime program in the 1980s called “Unsolved Mysteries” which ran the story about six months after the crime in Waterford Township.

   The night the show was to air I prepared for a quick trip to wherever in the country the couple might turn up after the broadcast. The show aired on a Friday and Saturday I learned that the couple had been located in Moses Lake, Washington after a viewer spotted and recognized the couple.

   I was livid. When I called the editor who made the call to send another reporter he said he thought I didn’t want to go on the trip. How he came up with that I will never know, but I know he was playing favorites with a reporter that he had once worked with at another newspaper.

  So imagine my surprise when I got a call from that reporter asked for help from me because he knew very little about the story and was way out in Washington with no one to get more information. The reporter, who I was friends with, told me he was told that I directly told the editor I did not want to fly to Washington. So it was a big fat lie.

More beautiful Idaho scenery

    Not to belabor this part of the story, the editor and I had words and also an audience with the big editor who admitted I had been screwed out of a very good story.  I guess to my credit I did help the reporter put together his story and we stayed friends. It wasn’t his fault he was told a lie.

    Anyway, I finally made it to Moses Lake, Washington just about 33 years too late.

   At least on this leg of the trip I finally got to use my sunglasses for the first time since we left Tucson.
 

More beautiful scenery

    During our travels on this day we saw deer, ducks and for the first time in awhile windmills both those working and large pieces on the way to a destination.

   The varying scenery of pine trees and snow-capped mountains made every turn in the road a chance to gasp in awe at another post card vista.

    I was also pleased that Idaho has a 75 mph speed limit and Montana lets you go even faster in 80 mph sections of I-90.

Helena dinner stop

    My trip planning failed a little as I booked us into a hotel room in Helena, Montana which I thought was on I-90, but in fact is about 30 miles off that freeway, which meant a lengthy side trip.

    During one section of our trip in Washington, the farmers were kind enough to put signs on the fences so we would know what kinds of crops they were growing. Potatoes, sweet corn, canola seeds, beans and something called “Timothy.”

    Idaho has a very difficult construction detour procedure that puts traffic going in both directions at high speed on the same side of the freeway for short sections. No jersey barriers, just flimsy little yellow lane markers separate the opposing traffic.

Montana Capitol

   They have jersey barriers, but they don’t use them to divide the opposing traffic.

    Once we got to Helena, Montana we drove by the Capitol building and then had dinner in downtown Helena at a very nice sports bar.

Mileage out of Seattle: 10041

Time out of Seattle: 7:30 a.m. (PDT)

Mileage in to Helena:  10645

Time in to Helena (MDT): 7:08 p.m.

    The trip from Helena, Montana to Bismarck, North Dakota had just a short period of foul weather, but for the most part was a long, but uneventful trek through the northern plains.

Montana travel scenery

    On this day we spotted pronghorn antelope and the girl from Buffalo, NY spotted a buffalo in the wild (technically a bison but who’s that picky.)


    Joan also completed her 50-state goal. Before this trip Joan had been in 47 states, but with our stops in Oregon, Washington and North Dakota she finished her 50-state goal. We had previously been in both Montana and Montana when we went to Yellowstone. So both of us have now traveled to all 50 states.

    We crossed the beautiful and wide Yellowstone River several times while traveling on I-94 and the scenery in both Montana and North Dakota was breath taking at times. Thank goodness for Theodore Roosevelt who is responsible for saving so many of our natural treasures from greedy developers.

Joan and her 50th State!

    In North Dakota we tried to visit the Theodore Roosevelt National Forest, but it was closed for the season.

   Montana places small white crosses at the locations of fatal accidents and some of the roads, especially the curves, are littered with those crosses. They do make you think.

   One of the more unusual sightings of the day was a motorhome trailing an unusual vehicle. We are used to seeing motorhomes trailing small vehicles (or even large ones) but today we saw one pulling a trailer carrying a full sized back hoe. We guess the guy does contract work and lives in his motorhome while traveling to his jobs.

    The gas stations on the plains are few and far between and today I almost stretched our range a little too far. I’ve learned to trust the electronics in the Tahoe, but today even I was sweating bullets as we headed to Mills City the only place we could get gas after Billings, Montana.

Friday's crappy weather - Joan took photo

    For a moment I thought about stopping short and filling up in Billings, but the quick math I did in my head convinced me I had at least enough gas to get to Mills City. I watched the gauge drop to “E” and then the warning light went off when we were still 20 miles from our gas stop.

    We made it, but the Tahoe has a 26-gallon tank and I pumped 24.9 gallons into it at the station. That’s just a little too close for comfort.

    In Montana we spotted an exit road that I would be reluctant to take. “Bad Route Road” was the name of the exit. By the way Montana is a very long state.

    As I mentioned previously, we encountered slick roads for about 20 miles about 2 hours into our drive today over the mountains near Bozeman, Montana. Temperatures dropped to 27, the snow was lightly falling and the trucks and cars were throwing up a lot of salty spray, but we made it safely through that section and the roads dried up and the weather greatly improved for the rest of the trip.

    We arrived in Bismarck (we lost another hour to geography) but arrived in time to get a nice dinner in downtown Bismarck at the “Blarney Stone” which was recommended by the hotel clerk. We both had steak stroganoff and it was very good.

    I have a couple more photos to add to this post, but they haven't come through yet and may not until tomorrow. A technical glitch of sorts.

    Back at the hotel we did a load of laundry to get us through the rest of our trip and enjoyed a quiet night in our room. Tomorrow: Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Mileage out at Helena: 10645

Time out at Helena (MDT): 7:06 a.m.

Mileage in at Bismarck, ND: 11304

Time in at Bismarck (CDT): 5:25 p.m.