Monday, the 5 of us hit the road bright and early. 5? Yes, Cora, Gwen, her two African dwarf frogs, Kermit and Trevor, and me. We are driving Cora's Corolla back to sell. We'd kept it out there and drove it when we were there, but with insurance and all, it's going to be just as cheap to rent cars on our visits.
Hopping (frog humor) on I-90, we cut thru the Cascade Mountains via Snoqualmie Pass and into Eastern Washington. Wow, what a difference a few sets of mountains made!
From pine covered mountains to rolling desert like prairie. As the Columbia River wound across our path, we paused at the Wild Horses Monument. Cora started to say something about there being horse statues up on a ridge, and I said, "Like THOSE!" as I pointed up at a sculpture of a herd of wild horses thundering along the ridge top.
A view of the gorge.
A view of the gorgeous.
Right after the Wild Horses, we zoomed by, I cannot tell a lie, George, Washington.
Lunch found us desperate for a bathroom, but not so desperate as to not explore the scenic downtown of Ritzville, WA.
Ritzy!
I know I keep mentioning the Gwen's frogs that are traveling with us. They have spent the last year living with Grandma June, but we'd always planned to bring them to Chicago: somehow. You can't fly with them. They wouldn't be allowed carry on, and flying in checked luggage would exposed them to far to much cold and shaking trauma. The place where Cora bought them strongly discouraged shipping them (they offered to send us replacements instead of having us ship them ourselves). So, it needed to be ground transit with us. So, we flew out with a cooler I got from one of my old companies. In the cooler, the temperature was a little more consistent, when water sloshed out of their tank (and it did) it would be contained, and when we got out of the car, we could take them with us, and no one would be the wiser. So, here are the boys (and the girl) belted in for the trip.
Here's a better shot. And this was about the last time you would want to get your nose that close to the opening. As I mentioned, the frog water did slosh out, despite my rubber bands holding the lid down, they lost about a cup of water a day into the towels. Let's just say, by the time we got home, the funk was such, that we didn't even bother trying to wash the towels or clean the cooler. You weren't going to feel comfortable wiping your face with one of those towels, or eating out of that cooler no matter how many times you'd washed them with bleach.
Refueling both our bodies and the car, we blasted through Spokane, WA, and Coeur 
But no joke was this forest fire burning in a little valley off the side of the interstate.
I sure the chopper pilot was glad to have a handy source of water from the Clark Fork River right there.
As the afternoon started to fade to evening, we set our sights on wrapping up the day in Bozeman, MT. And it wasn't going to be too late. And then it hit us.
Frak! We're now on Mountain Time, so we've lost an hour! (Not the last time a time zone change would bite us in the butte.) After a quick dinner and a fuel up, we raced the setting sun from Butte to Bozeman.
And lost.
So, it's late and pretty dark when we got to Bozeman. Should rename it "Booze-man" because I could have used a drink! We pulled in to the Comfort Inn, only to get the "Jesus Treatment" (no room @ the Inn.) It appears classes were starting at MSU-Bozeman, so it was full up with parents. Okay, fine, we crossed the street to The Bozeman Inn. They had plenty of rooms.
How bad could it be?
Pretty nasty. There was exposed cinder block. That overhang in back? I could barely stand under it (my hair brushed the ceiling). And the bathroom was on the frightening side. At least there wasn't some nasty mystery stain on the box spring.
Oh wait…
Is that spilled coffee? Vomit? Or was there a murder in here?
Next stop: Yellowstone.
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