So, the road trip blog started late and ended early, but at least the flickr photos were mostly up to date. I've got more to say and we've got more photos to share, but for now I'm getting settled and relaxing with family and friends. The weather has been great and the party was awesome. Cheers.
[By Jenny] After cooking a fantastic dinner at our Yellowstone campsite, we watched six feet under at our picnic table, the monitor flanked by pink candles affixed to the top of recently emptied beer bottles contributed to the atmosphere. As families hurried past our site to get to the bathroom, I wondered if they glanced at our glowing screen and knew what we were watching. Depending on who was in the shot, I tried to imagine if the character was identifiable to the series or not. Would someone want to stop and watch with us? Were they annoyed that we brought such decadent technology into nature?
More interesting than Old Faithful, we thought, were the tourists waiting for it to erupt. Families lined up in a giant semicircle, standing in shorts and fanny packs or seated on the designated benches. The army of oohs, ahhs and camera clicks as predictable as the geyser itself. Hundreds of people staring at tiny LCD displays of the spectacle instead of gaping in awe at natureпїЅs controlled fury. We had our cameras out, too, preserving memories (or whatever). Everyone wandered toward the gift shop.
Something oddly satisfying about typing on a laptop in the middle of a campsite.
We left Missoula early yesterday morning, and finally saw the historic side of the town; it turns out (unsurprisingly) that weпїЅd been staying in its newish industrial stripmall realm. Down the road, Butte, Montana is quaint with its boarded bungalows and brick buildings: big banks and brown bars and some kind of business called a пїЅbooteryпїЅ. We took a couple of laps through the "Uptown" main street area looking for food, but the bakery had closed years ago. Locals seem to prefer the stoplights, Subways and Best Buys of progress to their own history.
Missoula, Montana looks more like Los Angeles than any other crappy strip mall town we've yet happened upon during our travails across these great United States (isn't that kind of a dumb, technical name for the country?) The air is cool and the mountains greener, but the main streets are blighted with the same STAPLES, Subway, Home Depot, motel and restaurant chains that now corrupt and homogenize every town on this god-forsaken hemisphere, thanks to the suburban wasteland first developed in Orange County. If there's a soulful pre-1997 village in Missoula somehwere, we haven't found it yet.
We left Portland at the crack of dawn, due east on the 84 into the rising sun, following the river halfway across the state. The terrain was rugged; Jenny napped as I drove, thinking about Lewis and Clark and those late 19th century geological government surveys documenting the savage frontier. All that bulky photographic equipment. I saw tree farms and rocky riverbanks. After a fruit stand snack stop we ditched the freeway for back roads, munching tamales (unexpectedly good) and beef jerky (remarkably peppery).
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