Day 8: Idaho and Montana

August 3, 2011 - After what seemed like eternity in Walmart this morning, we finally headed out of Spokane. Don't get me wrong, I love traveling. However, once you've been in a destination long enough to know where the major stores are you come dangerously close to living there. It was getting to the point to where we didn't really need the TomTom to find our way around. That's bad.

Idaho

We quickly passed through Washington and into what is called "the panhandle" of Idaho. This short stretch of state is barely recognizable as different except for the welcome sign. Bruce and I stayed long enough to toss the football back and forth.

A nice relaxing stop just to say we stayed over in Idaho.

Montana, Part One

Montana is the fourth largest state in The Union. Besides having beautiful hills and wooded scenes, Montana has a thing for bears (no wonder I liked it over there so much).  Even though Southern Montana is very mountainous, the infrastructure is relatively level. There were only a couple of parts where the truck and its load struggled to climb.

Montana...while driving.

Silver Dollars Bar & Gift

One of the first tourist traps that we stopped at was 500,000 Silver $'s. The place gets it's name from the silver dollars that patrons to the bar have left over the course of the bars tenure. Incidentally, there are more silver dollars than 500,000; the number keeps rising.

Big and bold, this sign caught our attention.

Batman was busy shopping, so Humberto posed for the camera.

The attached gift shop had a wide variety of Montana themed items, Native American crafts, and a wide assortment of other knick-knacks We spent way too much time browsing around that we blew our planned stopover point and had to choose another location.

However, we escaped with plenty of fun stuff...probably too much stuff.  I even got Bruce a mounted jackelope head for the camper.  I figured Bruce could use it to hang his hats on.

Kampgrounds of America

We ended up trying to find a RV campground, since, uh, we had a camper now. Using one of Bruce's apps on his phone, we happened to find a couple of them. In the end, it was the military discount that persuaded us to go with the Kampgrounds of America site.

The site was nice; full hookup for very little money. Additionally, they had a store, shower facility, and breakfast in the morning. In all, it was a great way to start the camper portion of our trip.