Bozeman to Spokane

We finally arrived at Mom's house.

No pictures for today; we spent the day just driving on the Interstate so we could get here at a reasonable hour. The only stop we made was for lunch; that was at an IHOP. I'm sure you've all seen IHOPs before, so I didn't bother to take a picture.

Actually, there were lots of picture-worthy things we saw today, though. The scenery, for one. The mountains in Montana and Idaho are amazingly beautiful, and we spent the day driving through them. And as we came past Lake Couer d'Alene, even Lulu looked up from the DVD player and said, "Wow!"

Just east of Missoula, Montana, we drove past a wildfire. We could see the smoke from miles away, and you could see the orange reflection on the bottom of the white smoke that meant it was burning hard. As we got closer, we could see that whole mountainsides had been burned, and some were still smoking. Lanes were blocked for fire equipment, and at one point we could see the fire close to the road. All the ranches had their irrigation sprinklers turned on their houses and the fields close to the houses, and we saw a few people evacuating horses. The fire had burned right down to one house, and the firefighters were there trying to keep it from taking the house. Very scary. And definitely worth pictures, but stopping would have caused traffic problems and interfered with the fire equipment, so I just kept going. Long after we were out of the immediate fire area, we could still see and smell smoke.

We got to Mom's house in the afternoon, and it was great to see her. We stayed up late gossiping and complaining about politicians and had a good time. Tomorrow, we'll go visit Dad in the nursing home--and we'll take lots of pictures, I promise!