Tuesday, September 13, 2011 Missoula, Montana

6:40 am

The temperature is +11 C, with a high predicted of +28 C. There was a lot of smoke in the air yesterday. There are a number of forest fires within a couple of hundred miles so this may stay with us for much of the trip.

8:00 PM Life

Today was primarily a driving day as we headed south to Bozeman, Montana.

We stopped at Dillon for information, gasoline and a light lunch. The information was primarily to see if we could find out more about the road conditions for a gravel road that is about 60 miles long. The lady at the information bureau knew about the road and gave it a green light. We had an excellent snack at a local coffee shop and headed back to the Rav4. I had parked it in front of the museum and I commented at the time that I thought we had been here before about 10 years ago. I said that there was a huge stuffed bear just inside the entrance door. Sure enough, when we opened the door, there it was.

The gravel road turned out to be a delight. It was quite bumpy and rocky in places which brought our speed down to about 50 kph. This was great. We moseyed along a wide valley and really enjoyed the scenery. We saw pronghorn antelope, white-tail deer, a large number of mountain bluebirds as well as some horned larks. The bluebirds were really numerous - I am sure we saw at least 50, maybe more.

Once we were back on pavement we overrode our GPS and took a more scenic route to Bozeman, arriving at about 5 PM.