Our next stop on the way back towards home was Grand Tetons National Park in Jackson, Wyoming. It is just another gorgeous mountain place. Can you tell I am a mountain girl? I just love them. We were there for a day and a half and were able to see a couple of fox, over a dozen moose, a coyote, some elk, and some big horn sheep. One of the afternoons we went on a wagon ride out onto an Elk Refuge. The elk were just about to start heading out of the valley and into the mountains to have their young and live in their own areas until winter next year, when they come back to graze in this big valley again. Our guide was a girl from Idaho, who was also a vet tech. We were her last wagon ride crowd ever, as she would be moving on to work as a vet tech next winter. She was so knowledgeable. I was really impressed by her. Although there was still FEET of snow, it was warm (high 50’s and low 60’s) so we walked without jackets and even got a little sun on our faces as the sun was pretty bright reflecting off the snow. If you have never been to the Grand Tetons….put it on your bucket list!

I know I have been playing catch up and blogging from things that happened three weeks ago. However, I wanted to end this night (as I need to get to bed and plus I swear I am getting mouse clicker’s forearm) with something that happened TODAY. I spent all morning at the Cancer Center at Bergan Mercy seeing the oncology nurse practitioner (love her!), getting labs drawn, my port flushed, a zometa infusion via the port, and then a shot of Lupron. So I have a bandaid on my left buttock (really hip) and right boob (really chest) from the needle sticks today (I am on blood thinners so they don’t take a chance and always bandage me up). All went well. I have never taken zometa without chemo and all the drugs that go with it, like the massive amounts of steroids, so we’ll see how I feel in the morning. So far so good. Even had 3 zoom meetings today and two of them were Tai Chi classes for cancer patients. So below is a selfie from treatment today and then the other two are where Tallinn plants himself when I am doing Zoom Tai Chi. (right in front of me or right under my feet). Good thing we move slow, because I was stepping around him the whole time. :o)

On our last full day in Montana, the day was clear and so Rich and I went out early to get some pictures from Lake MacDonald in Glacier National Park. Once again, it was deserted, so we spent a couple of hours just taking in the view….which was phenomenal.

We took lots of long walks to keep the dog tired each night. There were lots of bodies of water nearby, including Whitefish Lake. The stillness of the water made for awesome views. We found some areas on a beach with frozen waves. Very cool! Of course there were also the ski slopes, where Rich hopes to live his retired life as a ski bump in the winter.

Not many horse places are open during the winter….but this one in rural Kalispell was! The three of us spent 2 hours on the trails in the mountains on horseback. It was a lot of fun and we all enjoyed it. My horse, Caramel, was in the back and decided to do a lot of plodding…..so kept falling behind. So we had to do a fair bit of trotting to keep up. It was a blast. The other family was from Chicago and when one of the little kids asked why the young man riding in the rear was wearing a gun in his holster, he said, “Just in case of mountain lions.” I think the dad of the kids, wearing square-toed leather dress shoes (sigh) blanched a bit. There were a lot of deer and turkey in the barnyard waiting for us to leave on the trail ride so they could eat the leftover feed dropped on the ground by the horses. Lily said it was her favorite part of the trip. (bonus!) It is hard to please a 16 year old year on a vacation with her parents and her dog that was breathing on her in the car the whole trip. :o)

Our land is in Flathead Valley which includes Bigfork, Kalispell, Columbia Falls, Polson, and Whitefish. We stayed in Whitefish (where the ski resort is). They are all relatively close to each other…maybe 10-15 minutes’ drive between each. We ate at local restaurants and all in all, just had a great time running around getting to know the area better. It is not a bustling metropolis, but that is what we wanted: Peace. However, we were told that Californians are moving there in droves….20,000 people had moved to the Flathead Valley in 2020 alone. In fact, our closest neighbors on our property are from California. They are from the Lake Tahoe area and have 4 kids, 3 Nigerian goats and two horses. They are really nice people and I look forward to being their neighbor. We went to our property first thing when we arrived….just as the sun was setting. The winds were crazy (kinda like Nebraska) and a cold front was blowing in. In the morning there was snow on the ground and it snowed off and on all day. We took the morning to travel to Glacier and go hiking. Most of the park is closed during the winter because there is something like 80 feet of snow on many of the inside roads. (not exaggerating…) So only 11 miles were open, but you can hike any of the trails on foot or snowshoe. No one was there but us, so it was so peaceful being able to walk through the forest in the snow. I even found a tree with a girl’s face on it! Lake MacDonald had the beautiful clear water with the colorful Montana river rocks, but the snow made us not able to see the mountains on this day, which was a bummer, because we knew they were huge and right there….just behind the snow and clouds.

Two years ago we went on a tour of Glacier National Park. We fell in love with the area and ended up buying 10 acres of land about 25 minutes from the west entrance to Glacier National Park in rural Columbia Falls, MT. We bought the land site unseen because it was a great deal we just couldn’t pass up. The land is surrounded by mountains and all the houses in the area are also 10 acre parcels that cannot be split up. This assures us we’ll have lots of space. Almost all the “ranchettes” as they call them, have houses on them. We are one of two that are sold but not built on yet. You never really know how big 10 acres is until you walk it. We made the right choice, as it is just phenomenal. We went out there everyday…sometimes more than once a day to look at the views from different parts of the land…trying to figure out where the house should sit and the driveway should go. We also have a few trees on the edge of our property and we took some of the young saplings and replanted them in the middle of our acreage so we might have a few trees once we start building in two years or so. The whole area used to be a potato farm. On the edge of our property was a root cellar and a tiny shack/house used to be there. Rich wanted to tear it down and fill it in, but once we talked to some neighbors who had lived there many decades, we decided we want to restore it. We’ll make it sound then use reclaimed barn wood to side the small building that we can keep stuff we may need close to the road. One of the days we were there, a plane was circling around above us and we realized it was a KC-135 stratotanker….the plane Rich flew more than any other aircraft when on active duty. We took that as a good sign that we were meant to be there. Tallinn loved everything about it. There are so many wild animals around. Herds of deer (you never just saw 5…it was more like 30 at a time) and turkey…they travelled in large groups as well. Tallinn loved roaming around smelling the smells and fetching sticks Lily was throwing for him. Many of our neighbors have horses, cows, goats, etc. Being here makes me truly want to fight hard for time…because I really want to make to sit on my front porch and look out over those beautiful mountains.

Oh my goodness, we had fun here! It was super windy but warmish (low 60’s maybe – it’s all relative) yet there were some piles of snow still in shady areas. We had been in the car forever at this point (this was day 3 so we were all itching to get out and play – us and the dog). Tallinn was a great traveler. He needed to be out and running though for a bit. He has never been swimming. He loves to cool his toes in but has never really been in the water. Tallinn is a bit neurotic…he gets very fixated on things like balls, toys, sticks, and rocks. Rich skipped a rock across the still very cold and quickly running Missouri River and Tallinn went after that rock with gusto. Right into the strong current. He got about 30 feet out, realized he could no longer see the rock and he was in over his head….literally. He turned around and we all saw the whites of his eyes as he panicked a bit trying to swim to shore. That was his indoctrination to swimming. Ever since we have had to try and keep him out of the water! Oh, and the bigger the stick the better for Tallinn! He enjoys thwacking Rich on the back of the knees with his “stick” so he will turn around. Tallinn then drops it at his feet and waits impatiently for him to throw it for him. He is a strange little fellow but he sure did give us a lot of laughs on the trip!

So Montana is gorgeous. The skies are just how they claim them to be….big. Even in the overcast and somewhat cloudy weather we had off and on during our drive across the state, it was still breathtaking. We stopped in the geographical center of the nation (this including Hawai’i and Alaska) and ended up in Belle Fourche, SD….pretty far west.

Okay, I am really playing catch up. I know I haven’t been blogging for nearly a month, but a lot has been going on and I just really wanted to take it all in first….enjoy the moment…then come back and blog it. So for those whom have reached out worried that I am ill, I am not – just been busy. I will try and post quite a bit tonight to catch up and you will see what I mean. First set of photos are from a rest stop. Yes, a rest stop, in Chamberlain, SD. My friend Michelle Krueger had been there recently and posted photos and I had read about the statue before online, so felt we had to incorporate it into our trip somehow. We ended up picking up Lily from school on a Friday and taking off from there, so we spent the night in Chamberlain. I was hoping to get sunrise photos (because they would have been SOOO cool) but the weather did not cooperate one bit that day. There is something to be said about overcast skies as well though. This statue is very big. I have included some photos with people in it so you can see the height of it.