Home Again

After a short, but nice visit with Whit, Jess, and the granddogs, it’s time to wrap up this year’s Choteau Summer blog. It’s usually impossible to summarize a summer in one word, but this time we can do it: cool. I mean that in every sense of the word. Since Missouri, we’ve been sweltering in thick heat. However, yesterday morning on the Weather Channel we heard that 1-3 inches of snow was expected near Choteau above 7,000 feet. To everyone who has ever asked us why we bought the house in Choteau we’ve answered, “to get out of Virginia’s summer heat and humidity.” Of course, the first summer we lived there it hovered uncharacteristically in the 90’s for weeks on end. However, this is the summer we hoped for.

To our friends and family who got totally sick and tired of hearing us talk about our quilt-sleeping nights and long-sleeve, blue jean-wearing days, we’re sorry. Buy a house in Montana! No, sorry, we’ve promised our neighbors there that we won’t encourage more Easterners to invade their quiet town. It's great to be home in Virginia, but we look forward to our cool, quiet summers.

East Coast Blues...

The further east we drove, the more heat, humidity, pollution, and traffic we encountered!

This is the view as we came into Nashville yesterday.

Things to Talk About While Driving Across Nebraska

Favorite Views:

• The drive across Wyoming is certainly one of our favorites. After leaving West Yellowstone we encountered massive road reconstruction across the Togwotee Pass (elevation 8, 530 ft) on Rt. 287. The delays in getting across gave plenty of time to soak in the views. The whole road will probably be one of our all-time favorites, as it went on through Dubois, Lander (I want to return to visit historical sites), and then picked up the Oregon Trail through the valley. It continued on through the Red Desert, which is the Great Divide Basin; an area inside of the Continental Divide which drains nowhere! Wyoming was a series of mountains, hills, and valleys, something we did not expect, and the mountains, such as Elk Mountain in SW Wyoming, are spectacular.
• The cracked and weathered granite piles (mountains?) at Split Rock, were a major landmark on the Oregon Trail. The landmark had many connotations, including the fact that the Mormons knew that they were about a week from Salt Lake City.
• Harry enjoyed the girl surveying on I-80 in skin-tight jeans
  

Things We’ve Learned:

• At the Trail’s End Motel in Dubois, Harry naturally struck up a conversation with our neighbors, who were on huge Harleys. One of the riders was a 60-ish man who is a bee keeper in Buffalo, Wyoming. Each December he loads 5 semi-trailer loads of bee hives and sends them to California to pollinate almond trees. In the summer he works nights, moving his bees frequently as farmers spray their fields with pesticides. If you want to know whether our food is grown safely, ask a bee keeper.
• Butch Cassidy bought a huge ranch near Dubois, Wyoming with money stolen from train heists.
• Dubois, Wyoming was originally known as Never Sweat, Wyoming, but the postal service refused to use that name and changed it to Dubois. In protest, the natives pronounced it DEW boys.
• Often the Mormon wagon trains traveled on the other side of the river from the Oregon Trail trains going west to avoid confrontations.
• Every road in our country is either being rebuilt or repaved – your tax dollars at work.
• Ramada Inns apparently think it’s a good thing to put down comforters and six pillows on their beds, even when it’s a 100 degree summer. That requires that everyone run their air conditioning full blast all night so that they can sleep under the covers. I heard the coal-fired power plants in Nebraska humming away all night. Good-by Ramada.
  

Animals we’ve seen so far:

• Beautiful bald eagle circling above us in Yellowstone
• Dead red fox on road
• Dead pronghorn antelope (unusual) on road
• Harry saw a black bear running on a dirt road by the interstate near the Wyoming-Nebraska border.
• Deer, which do not count.

Day Three: On the Way Home

Not much to report from today; driving across Nebraska was corn and more corn. We've been listening to reports of flooding in Iowa, and sure enough, the minute we crossed the state line from Nebraska to Iowa, the road was flooded by the Missouri River!

Day Two: On the Way Home

This morning we got up to this beautiful sunrise above our small hotel in Dubois, Wyoming. Dubois is an artist community, and its population of about 900 doubles in the summer.
As we drove east on Rt. 287, we were following the Oregon Trail, Mormon Trail, and Pony Express route at one of the few places in the United States where all three trails were one. This pull-off showed the view the settlers had as they crossed central Wyoming.

The stage stop was built at the base of this granite mountain.

Further east we stopped at this pine tree which is growing out of granite, protected in an island in the middle of I-80! It was a landmark for the settlers going west by foot, wagon, and later cars, and many people have documented it in pictures over the years.

Day One, Continued...

In case you've never been to Yellowstone National Park,
here's an example of one of the amazing sights.

On Our Way Home: Day One

We left Choteau this morning a little after 7am, saying goodby to the

beautiful Rocky Mt. Front as we traveled through nearby Augusta.

We stopped just as we were leaving Montana for the border of
Yellowstone National Park to eat lunch by this stream.


It was hard to find a parking place in Yellowstone, something we had not
encountered there before. This basin was less crowded and full of great sights.

As we left West Yellowstone, we ran into major construction on
Rt. 287 in route to our destination tonight, Dubois, Wyoming.

I mean, really major. Getting here was a long and tedious process.

However, it gave us time to see some beautiful sights along the way.

Rt. 287 really is a scenic highway, and I look forward to traveling it again.

(without multiple chase cars)

The End of Gardening...

Remarkably, from my 16 feet by 18 inch garden I harvested:

• Three meals of peas (the last on August 1st)


• One meal of beets plus another meal of the beet greens (Savory Beet Greens Pasta, recipe to come if it tastes OK)


• 15 carrots


• 3+ meals of Swiss chard


• 5+ meals of kale


• 3+ meals of spinach (including a new crop harvest today)


• Many meals of two varieties of leaf lettuce, including a couple of gallons for Laurie and 2 gallons which I gave to Jill to sell.

My two square foot gardens on the other side of the house have fared less well. First, they languished all summer due to the cold nights, then, when they decided to grow and were ready to harvest this weekend, the deer found them (they were just waiting, like me) and devoured most of the lettuce and even my basil and cress. I hate deer.

Community Rabbits!

And don't tell me it was the rabbits that ate my garden. (although I know they have enjoyed nibbling it) The deer left hoof prints!

Getting Pretty for the Wedding

Over the last few weeks we've been working with Kaufman's in Great Falls to get an outfit for Harry to wear to Whit and Jess's wedding. Brian Kaufman (see reflection in mirror) took Harry on as a project, and the results were remarkable! He even found a tie to match my plum-colored dress. (No pictures on that until the wedding!)

Off to the Fair...

On Thursday we spent the day at the Fair in Great Falls with Shelly. There were many things to do and see, and we had a great time. The evening ended with a free show: LeAnne Rimes and the Great Falls Symphony! The Four Seasons Arena was packed and she put on a great show.

However, the chickens at the fair are spectacular.

Closing it Down

Sadly, we've begun the process of picking, putting away, and packing up. We leave a week from Tuesday, so there is much to be done in this last week.


Garden Update:

In April, I pulled up 18" of sod inside our Dr. Seuss fence and planted lots of hardy seeds, not having any idea whether any would grow. Low and behold, this was a wet spring, and we've eaten from these vegetables ALL summer! I still have one small picking of peas left before I pull up the plants and add them to my compost pile. I gave Jill Owens of Mt. Front Market two gallons of lettuce to sell on Friday, and after we had two more meals of lettuce this weekend, I pulled up the lettuce plants. The kale and chard continue to produce slowly, and we have carrots and beets in the ground to be eaten this week.

The exciting news is that we have two tomatoes getting ripe! We never thought we'd be here long enough to see one ripen, and the deer haven't been brave enough to go into the garden (yet). Our neighbor, Laurie, will get the rest of them.

My two square foot gardens on the other side of the house are just sitting there full of tiny plants. We've had such cold weather that nothing planted in June has done well. Even my flowers are just now looking full and colorful after the damaging hailstorm of mid-June. I hope to find new homes for them by next week.

Marking Off My To-Do List:

As is always the case, my to-do list is pages long. However, I marked one of them off today, as I took my first ride behind Harry on his Harley. I've been falsely accused of being "afraid" to ride with him. I resent that, as I don't think of myself as being afraid of many things. However, I DON'T like doing things for the first time, which to others may appear as fear. So now it's not a big deal any more... OK? And I plan to learn to ride the little Honda scooter before we leave, too. I thought our ride was spectacular. Despite thunder clouds all around us, Harry was determined they would miss us, so we rode across Freezeout Lake, through Fairfield, and almost to Augusta, where we turned around and raced back to Choteau, chased by a windy, dark storm. The sights and smells were amazing, and I wished that I had a camera to document the view.

Laurie and I have also finally picked out the color to paint as an accent color on her house before I leave. Thankfully there isn't much to paint (front porch door, etc.) and she can finish what I can't. It's plum! She will definitely own the "Purple House" by the time that's done. Stay tuned for the picture...

We still have an important hike to take, wedding clothes to pick up in Great Falls, the State Fair to attend on Thursday with Shelly, and lots of friends to see before we leave. I foresee a busy week.