singing trees of the forest, jubilant fields...

I've read of singing trees of the forest, jubilant fields, rivers clapping their hands, and mountains singing for joy, and now I've witnessed it. (Psalm 96:11-13, Psalm 98:7-8) We overnighted in Havre, MT and headed out this morning for West Glacier. We stopped in Browning, MT where we visited the Museum of the Plains Indians (great museum--thanks for the tip Byron), had a picnic lunch, then rolled westward to West Glacier, the west entrance to Glacier National Park. Here's a picture of the Sweet Grass Hills in Montana. Remember the movie with Robert Duvall called Broken Trail, where he and his nephew drive a herd of horses, along with 5 Oriental girls, across Montana? Well, the picture below shows where they were supposed to be. Here in Monatana is where the Sweet Grass grows. At one of the girls' funeral, Duvall mentions "from the Sweet Grass to the packing house". This is where we get our best wheat, Golden 86 and Red Chief. It's grown here in this corner of Montana, and the fields are beautiful.

"Amber waves of grain" is all we saw for awhile.

Then we arrived in Browning. We remembered being there 2 years ago when we sagged Nathan (son) on his Texas 4000 bicycle ride from Austin, TX to Anchorage, AK with a group from UT who were riding bikes 4000 miles and raising money for cancer awareness. We were in our RV and about 25 college kids were on their bicycles. Browning brought back many memories Nathan! And Glacier National Park is calling you!

As we approached the park on highway 2, we could see the snowcapped mountains.

We drove through the west entrance on The Road to the Sun, the 50 mile road that goes through the middle of the park. It was open for only 15 miles, but we walked a little, took some pictures, and then drove 3 hikers from the Netherlands, Germany, and the Czeck Republic to their meeting point. They were here for 2 weeks with a group of 15 young adults seeing the National Parks from Seattle to San Fransisco. They had walked too far and were worried they might miss their sag van.

See them in the background? I think they drew straws who would ask us for a ride.

While Alan and I were walking in a picnic area, we saw a tree that had fresh wood shavings on the ground. We saw all these rectangle and square cut outs. At first we thought some kid did it with a pocket knife, then remembered we read about the Pileated Woodpecker here does this, looking for insects. They can hear the insects inside the tree, and they peck out a perfect square or rectangle "hole" in the tree. The picture shows the rectangles down low and up high. Alan put his cell phone next to them to show a size comparison.

We're going to stay here a couple of nights, then on to Kalispell. I haven't told any of you yet, but I have marked on my atlas where every quilt store is! Thank you sister Judy for giving me my first Quilt Store Travelers book several years ago. I faithfully mark in yellow every town along our route that has a quilt shop. How fun is that? Alan agrees to drop me off at the front door of the ones I want to visit while he takes a short nap. His motto is "Stop, Shop and Roll". And he can maneuver our MH in some pretty small downtown streets and find a place to park our Mothership and Pod (motorhome and Jeep Liberty). Kalispell has 2 quilt shops I think. Woohoo!

So as the picture below shows, Alan is a man on a mission. We are rollin' along. He's so focused. Maybe I had just finished serving him his midmorning cup of Cafe Vienna.

I'm having fun blogging this, so I'll probably keep it up even after we get to Missoula for the summer.

from sea to shining sea, mimi

2 days, 800+ miles, and still rolling

It's been two days since my last post and we've rolled through Minnesota and almost through North Dakota. Alan's pick for one night was an Indian casino parking lot where there were free electrical hookups. so we arrived about 5 pm to see about 600 pup tents--you know, the small domes. They were all next to the casino at a huge park. When Alan goes outside to hookup to the electrical post, he realizes it's a small outlet and he doesn't have the correct connector for it. So we end up boondocking (parking for the night without any electrical, water, or sewer hookups, usually in a place that isn't an RV park or campground), which we like to do. It's fun to see how little electricity and water we can use. Plus it's free. So while he goes into the casino to check it out, I hear the drums. Loud, Indian drums. We soon realize it's the Indian tribe's Pow-Wow, and they have it during Memorial Day weekend. Alan quickly comes back from the casino to say everyone in there was smoking. And he means everyone. We've noticed here in the north that so many people smoke. And especially the Indians. We've traveled through quite a few Indian Reservations and see so many smoking. So back to the Pow-Wow. Alan walks over to the Pow-Wow to check it out. By now we hear the "hey, yeh, yeh....Hey, yeh, yeh. He reports the costumes are beautiful, many people are dancing, and it's a competition of costumes, dancing, drum beating. We have the windows open because it's about 55 degrees, no humidity, and the drums and chanting are louder and louder. They have a loud speaker system. At 10 pm it starts raining. Alan states their chanting is working. It must be a rain dance. Hundreds of cars start leaving, like from a small town football game on Friday night. Maybe the Pow-Wow is over. 30 minutes go by and the drums start back up. Then the chanting. We went to sleep with the drums beating until midnight. If you've never heard a Pow-Wow, it's like laying in bed and your heartbeat is on a speaker, a very loud speaker. The rythym doesn't change, I still can't figure out what they were competing for, other than who could hit the drum the loudest.

The next morning we headed west on highway 2 and made it across the rest of Minnesota, but first we had to go see Alan's childhood friend. Paul Bunyan. We stopped long enough for me to take a picture of the giant statue of Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox Babe, while Alan sang the Paul Bunyan song over and over. He says I've led a sheltered life since I've never heard the song and couldn't sing along with him.

I realized after seeing my photo that you can't tell how big they are, but believe me, they're BIG. Our motorhome and tow car is in the background on the right. Babe's legs are taller than me.

We cross over from Minnesota to North Dakota, and see a sign for the geographical center of North America. Who wouldn't stop for that? See my picture?

Alan and I start a discussion of where the southern line of North America is. He first says it's at the Panama Canal, then he says it's in Ecuador at the equator. I can google it, but does anyone know? In the meantime I turned around from this marker and saw this, which I believe to be more interesting than the geographical center of North America. I didn't ask what it was, and still don't know, not sure I want to know.

Can you imagine being from Rugby, ND? If I were from Rugby, ND I'd say "hello my name is Mimi Hildebrandt and I'm from Rugby, ND, home of Toe Jam." Now that's an ice-breaker.

Last night we rolled along longer than expected. We started out at 7:30 am, and driving about 200 or 300 miles is what we like to do, but who wants to stop at 2 or 3 in the afternoon? We continued on until the skies turned dark and blue. We saw miles and miles of miles and miles. We finally stopped at the busiest and tiniest fuel station in North Dakota. We boondocked in Stanley, ND. The temp got down to 38 degrees, but we were cozy in our MH. This morning I read about the tornadoes in Minnesota. Sounds like God had us get out of Minnesota just in time.

Here's a picture of the northwest corner of North Dakota. Not sure the picture does justice to just how far and wide this land is. This is where we get our wheat and corn from. The farmers don't live very near each other, so just think how lonely it must get in the winter months, and they have a whole lot of winter months. I used to ask God why He had me from Houston where the weater is so humid. I love Texas, but never was crazy about the weather. Now however, I say, Thank you dear Lord for giving us corn to eat, wheat to make bread, and thank you for not having me born in North Dakota.

Right now we're in the northeastern part of Montana, Big Sky country, The Big Open (Alan says he read that in one of his many western history books), and there's even more miles and miles of miles and miles, or, a whole lot of nothin'. It's beautiful, breathtaking scenery, and we can just picture buffalo herds on these rolling hills and in the Big Sheep Mountains just south of us. We're still on highway 2, The Old West Trail. Byron (son) rode this route on his bicycle a few years ago. Byron, we're talking about you on this lonely road, and seeing what kind of hills you had to climb on that bicycle of yours. For those of you that don't know, Byron rode his bicycle across the top of the United States--by himself. He did it in one summer. You saw some beautiful scenery, and had lots of thinking time!

That's all for today's post. I'm not sure where we'll stop tonight but I'll catch up in a day or two.

mimi

where is my 4 wheeler?

To live up north you must own a 4-wheeler--or a snow mobile. There are trails everywhere. Some towns even make paths for each vehicle, with light poles no less. One school district had a wonderul path with victorian lamplights so the kids could walk, ride or snowmobile to school! And there are trains with coal on them. The larger cities have huge coal factories with huge mountains of coal outside them. This weekend is Memorial weekend. To the people who live up here, it means 4 wheeler weekend. They're everywhere, even on the highway. That's all you hear, the 4 wheeler motors. A few days ago Alan and I drove to the Taquemenan Falls in Michigan. It was cold and rainy, but we needed to get out and do something. I'm posting pictures of the Lower and Upper Falls.

The waterfalls are rusty looking. We were told it's organic matter. It looks like iron to us. While at the Falls, we saw a busload of kids unload and visit the falls. The teacher told us in Michigan every Junior High and High school class gets to take an overnight field trip. This class of 7th and 8th graders combined had a 2 night field trip to the falls. Wow.

I'm also posting a picture of last night's sunset. It was beautiful. God sure gave us a beautiful world to live in. He could have given us a solid color sky but His awesomeness gave us a multicolored beautiful sunset.

And I'm also posting a cute Dairy Queen that's in Sault Ste. Marie, MI.

We woke up early this morning and drove through all of Upper Peninnsula, MI, then through the top of Wisconsin, and now we're in Minnesota, just west of Duluth. The RVs are here for fishing. Many of the owners are from Texas here for the summer. They call it here for the season. And they fish all the time.

Alan's tired from his long day of driving so we don't know if we're going to spend 1 or 2 nights here. We'll decide in the morning. Sweet dreams everyone.

mimi

You are here!

May 20, 2008

We're in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. That's in the U.P. (Upper Pensinsula) . We're going to stay here for 3 nights, then head west towards Missoula, MT, seeing sites along the way. We've never been this far north in Michigan, and I've never been to Wisconsin or Minnesota, so that'll be interesting. The temp here is 38 degrees, gale force winds I think, and raining off and on. And I packed my flip flops and Hawaiin dress! We drove up here to see the Soo Locks, the locks that every ship and freighter must go through from Lake Superior to Lake Huron and vice versa. These Great Lakes are so interesting, such a different lifestyle than what we're used to. Also the speech is different. I was told today that the weather right now is crazy-- pronounced like "Eeeet's crizy" with a long "e" in the first word and a short "i" in the second word, very nasal. I finally found my diet cherry vanilla Dr. Pepper, but the expiration date was yesterday, plus they charge 10 cents a can for bottle deposit, which added $1.50 to the total! I said no thank you and put them back, especially since they were expired and could have been flat. Then my groceries were put in a paper bag--they have no plastic bags at this small grocery store! Yesterday Alan and I were sitting in the MH and looked out the window and saw clouds of millions of tiny flies. We've named them May flies, and they were everywhere. They were on the MH, on the windows, and this morning he had to brush the slides off before the slides could be brought in. Here's a picture of the flies on the window and in the air--millions of them. When you go outside they were in your face!

As you can see in the top pictures of Alan, he's growing his moustache again. We took pictures of each other for our geni website profile pages. Okay, that's all for today. I'm going to try and keep up with this blogging, but I have to learn how to put the pictures in the right spot on the post!

Mimi