Here are some more pictures of GNP

Waking up to Bullwinkle

The biggest news from this past week was Taj’s first camping trip – at Glacier National Park (GNP). I love this kid. We are in some of the most inspiring scenery in this entire country, but he’s content grabbing handfuls of rocks and throwing them in whatever lake or stream or waterfall we’ve hiked to. He could care less about the scenery. I’m not being facetious about loving this either. It’s a reminder about how complicated sometimes being a grown up gets and how my need to be “wowed” makes it hard to enjoy simple pleasures. I’ve been backpacking a plenty, but I have only car-camped a couple of times – it’s a different beast entirely. When you backpack, every ounce of everything matters. Packing a toothbrush is just one more ounce to having a miserable trip. You cut out as much as possible and if your tent and breath smell like a big fart because you didn’t bring deodorant, hiking partner be damned. So I went out to make a couple of purchases before our camping trip – an inflatable mattress, and bear spray.

I’ll tell you what, when you’re getting ready to drag your 1 yr old and wife into grizzly country with snow still on the ground, it is tempting to want to spend money on so many different gadgets and gear. I found myself thinking if I bought that thing or this thing then we would really have a great trip. I had to take step back and remind myself that camping is all about simplifying and roughing it a little bit and remembering that enjoying your time with others isn’t about stuff.

Well sort of…so I bought this inflatable mattress – good thing I only went with the single height instead of the double height. I did not want to buy a battery-powered pump specifically designed for the mattress. (It was an item that comes under the category of crap for your crap. I realize that in modern life you have to buy crap, but I like to draw a line about buying crap to help me with the crap I already own). So I bought a cigarette-adapter air compressor that could blow up the mattress but also the tires on the 4runner if we ever get a flat in the middle of nowhere. Since Montana qualifies as an entire state for “the middle of nowhere” this is an inevitability more than a possibility. The guy at Wal-mart promised me it had the adapters I would need to blow up the mattress. Well it didn’t – which is why I am glad that I only bought the single thickness mattress. After huffing and puffing for no less than 90 minutes (no exaggeration), I have post-traumatic stress flashbacks when I see kids blowing up balloons.

So take a look at this tent:

We about froze to death in this circa 1980’s tent I bought used from the librarian at the mental hospital in Baltimore – she was a nice little old lady and she made it sound like it was new. I knew I was in trouble when she handed me a disintegrating box that was held together by an entire roll of duct tape. Sarah thinks it could be from the 70’s given that the dude pictured in the instructional manual had bell-bottoms and raging side-burns. Out-door tech has come a long way since canvas. Lets just say the tent was “well ventilated” – which would be great in 90 degree heat but not so much when its 30 degrees out. At least Taj didn’t seem to mind. He totally got into the whole sleeping in the same bed as mommy and daddy and turning it into a trampoline- which was cute until he vaulted head first into the ground.

Oh and the bear spray. Well Sarah and I have recently been watching Dog the Bounty Hunter. Watch Dog take down a criminal with mace and you’ll have a pretty good sense of what Bear spray is all about. When you get to GNP, you can actually take Ranger lead courses in shooting practice cans of mace at each other that contain sugar water or something. I think its just an excuse for the rangers to mace the tourists with something sweet so they taste better to the bears.

Also, relaxing by the fire after an alpine hike is different with a 1 yr old. It’s more a high stakes game of “Are you watching me now when I put my hand in the flame”

But seriously, our trip to GNP has been the highlight of my month off, besides really intimate time cuddling to avoid freezing to death, we saw some amazing wildlife and scenery. Rather than wax eloquent, I’ll just drop in a photo:

If that don't wanna make you come visit I don't know what will

Other recent adventures and mundanevents:

Drinking Ginseng beer at the local brewery with our new pastor while Taj was wandering around and making eyes with all the ladies (where was he when I was single).

Going to the “beach” Missoula-style- which involves walking a few blocks to the river, and swimming with bearded mountain men and women coming out of the hills for their weekly bath. Actually it’s a lot of fun, there is a Missoula beach scene at the river with a lot of families, hippies and an occasional mountain man all enjoying the river.

Emptying the last of our boxes and getting the guest bed and room ready for the flood of visitors we expect.

My friend Nate is getting ready to take the California bar exam. He recommended watching a movie “A lawyer walks into a bar”. I’m glad I don’t have to take that test – 3 days long. No wonder lawyers are such jerks. If I had to take a test like that, I’d probably come out a jerk on the other side too. Just kidding Nate, make that test your litter box and pee all over it. If you don’t pass, you’ll at least make an impression.

Sarah made homemade jam out of blueberries, and I’m trying to make homemade pickles from a recipe from my “Back to Basics” book, A Gehring (a necessary on the Montana bibliography)

Sweet Testiny

From Rob 7/16/10

So now that I’m about to turn 32 and I don’t have hardly anyone with whom to celebrate, I was thinking “What am I going to do for my birthday?” No need to ponder any further. As we were walking through downtown today I came a across the following flier.

That’s right Clinton, Montana (just over the ridge from Mizoola) has its annual Testicle Festival coming up. This honors nuts in paradoxical ways. One there is a wet T-shirt contest. Definitely, something that would appeal to most male apparati. The other one I’m not so sure about. My apparatus gets nervous just thinking about it. It is a nut eating contest in which the winner is identified as the person who can eat the most bull testicles in the allotted amount of time. This is a paradox indeed. Stimulate the nut then make it quiver in fear.

The great thing about this whole event is that day #1 of Testy Festy happens to be Barack Obama’s birthday August 4th – which also happens to be my birthday. There is one word to sum up the coincidence of these three dates – Testiny. Testiny is a phenomenon similar to destiny – meaning something that was just meant to be. Only Testiny has an element of machismo to it. A Celebration of Testicles, the birth of the most powerful military leader on the face of the planet, and My birthday. Ah sweet testiny... You can check out the website www.testyfesty.com

Apparently, I’m not the only Eastie who finds the homeless problem in Missoula concerning. Today, we all went to dragon hollow which is the coolest playground ever, with large xylophones, wooden palaces in the shapes of dragons, and a carousel. We were watching Taj play and looking forlorn hoping someone would adopt us as friends. I was noticing this over sun-exposed, weary man with a hollow stare. And I thought this was pretty sketchy – a loner taking in the scenery at a children’s playground. Suddenly I’m distracted by the sound of a small child self-asphyxiating with a piece of play ground equipment, screaming “Help me the Predators are getting me”. This goes on for about 5 minutes, when sun-burned, homeless-looking man screams “Noah. Get that thing off your neck before I choke you.” Apparently he was a dad who lets his young children watch violent movies and has an equally scary discipline style – we’ll call him East Coast Kid Strangler (ECKS – he comes up again later). Alright he may not have said the choking thing, but the tone in his voice hinted at it. Come to find out he moved out here from the east coast 5 years ago. I’m not so sure he moved to the right place because he proceeded to whine about the sunlight in the summer inviting people to mow their lawns late at night, the fact that forest fires in the summer bring smoke, and oh yeah “the bums”. At this point I kind of tuned him out to play hide and seek in the dragon with Taj. Not really the kind of friend we’re looking for. Blogging about bums in half-humor is different than ranting about them to strangers.

My other cool adventure for the day has been furniture shopping all within four blocks of our home. I’ve been trying to convince Sarah, that the cool thing to do now that we live in Missoula is decorate our home like a hippie hunting lodge. Something that says, “I’m laid back and want to hug trees but that I also don’t have a problem killin for food.” In terms of the décor, Sarah’s not quite there yet… But check out www.bluedogfurniture.com This is just a couple blocks from our house and that’s the kind of furniture I want. But a couple blocks in the other direction is Fran’s second hand furniture store. I was looking for a dresser but found this really cool antique wine barrel. So I bargained for it, got a good discount and rolled it four blocks down to bluedog. The dude there is gonna build us a coffee table with it and some pine trees. The cool thing is I’m helping ECKS from the park by buying furniture from bluedog. Forest fires are a big deal out here, and to keep them from raging out of control the forest has to be thinned of old dead trees – well these are the trees that bluedog uses for its furniture. So by getting this uber-cool coffee table made I’m helping make Missoula a cooler place for ECKS. Coincidence – I think not – this is what you call Testiny.

PS – ECKS would not be allowed at Testy Festy. If you read the rules of the festival you will see that A%%-holes and whiners are not allowed. So choke on them nuts Mr. ECKS.

Update 3 - Montana at last

A pointer for all you Easties, don’t text us - unless your arm is falling off, or if you are on fire – before 9AM your time. Here its only 7AM. So when you text us at 730 EST on your way to work – Please, remember its 530 here. Now, we’ve all made that mistake before, but if you keep it up, we’re going to start calling you guys at 1030P our time. Oh wait, you were asleep, but its only 1230 AM….

After Wyoming, we stayed over in Butte, Montana. According to our breakfast waitress who has lived in Butte, then Kentucky, and middle of nowhere Washington state, we made a huge mistake by moving to Missoula instead of Butte. Besides the fact that Butte is named after a smelly part of the human body; you might wonder why Butte is so cool. Well first of all there’s a Wal-Mart. Now, I know what you’re thinking, we’ve got one of those in our town. But hold on, right across the street from the Walmart in Butte lies interred one of Buttes’ most famous sons – Evil Kenevil. That’s right after buying cheap plastic storage containers for the crap you already bought from Walmart that you don’t need you can go and pay tribute to a dude who has driven a car through flaming hoops. And if that isn’t enough, Butte also has a Civic Center. Shut the front door, a civic center, this place is money. Apparently Disney on ice was just in town and we missed it!

At this point, I felt like the waitress had just kicked my Butte with the awesomeness of her town, I just about sent a resignation letter to the hospital here.

Also Butte apparently remains true to its mining roots – it is still legal to walk around piss drunk drinking alcohol in public. And I’m not talking shameful brown-bag style. Oh no I mean straight up forty-ounces-of-malt-liquor-in-hand-walking-down-the-sidewalk-slappin-your-ho-on-the-Butte style.

Anyways, we’re in Missoula now. We’ve left the crime ridden world of Baltimore, for the nice safe west. Only, it’s not so simple. You see the people who rented us their house we’re savvy business people. They failed to tell us that we are right across the street from the local rescue mission; 3 blocks away from the housing for chronically mentally ill (where I might add a resident recently stabbed a staff member before being admitted to St. Patricks – the hospital where I’ll be working), and 2 blocks away from the housing for indigent families of hospital patients. Now before I sound uncharitable, I want to state that I do not have it out for the homeless, the mentally ill, or patients. It’s just that after spending all day working with them and discharging them to a homeless shelter, I’m not keen on having them as neighbors. Why you might ask? Case in point – My brother calls this morning at 830 AM (which is 930 AM mountain time, and 1130 AM east coast time – a very reasonable time to communicate – some of you should start taking notes at this point) to ask if I’m settling into the fact that I live across the street from a homeless shelter OR if I heard any shouting this morning. The answer is YES to both – we are getting use to our new neighbors BUT also This morning before the clock struck 7 AM (9 AM EST) I heard the F-bomb shouted loudly multiple times by no less than two different bearded mountain men that were both homeless. Oh well, we’re over it by now; I mean really we’re from Baltimore, as long as the F-bombs don’t escalate to real bombs, we’re feeling pretty safe.

Other interesting news, our belongings were packed in apparently 320 pounds of corrugated cardboard. Please ask me how I know the answer to this question, because the answer still makes me laugh….wait you don’t seem interested enough…so I’m gonna build the suspense and you’ll have to keep reading to hear that story.

So Sarah’s pretty stoked because since the last time we visited they built a Target in Missoula.

The Safeway has free air for tires, which is just what our jogging stroller needed.

I’m writing this email at 945 PM (mountain time – Yes I know what time it is on the East coast) its still light outside.

Oh so the 320 pounds of corrugated cardboard – well lets just say I called Heidi at Public Works in Missoula City today, and we were sitting there talking like old Pals and Heidi lets me in on a little secret. There is a recycling center in Missoula that will take your empty moving boxes hassle free. So I spend about 2 hours folding down the boxes and loading up my forerunner and getting lost in Missoula and then I find the recycling center. And I just start throwing boxes like confetti into the bin marked “Cardboard” when this dude stops me and says, “You don’t want to do that”. And I’m thinking “Heidi, we had a deal, you promised no hassle”. And so I say to Dude, “Umm…well I spoke to Heidi and she said…” He interrupts me and says, “Did she tell you we BUY cardboard” and I say, “She just did”.

So I pull my 4runner onto a truck scale, I felt pretty mountain-manly doing so. Then hauled off the rest of the cardboard, pulled back onto the scale, and got re-weighed. I lost 320 pounds in ten minutes. You wanna no how much you get for 320 pounds of corrugated cardboard. Well if you’re not tired of doing time zone math, here’s a little more math for you: a two dollar bill, 1 gold dollar coin, and two dimes. That’s right a whopping $3.20.

PS for all you friends and family we’ve been encouraging to come and visit with us, I was kidding about the whole rescue shelter thing…I think they’re just filming an episode of the “The Wire: The Barksdales go Mountain” and they were just paid actors shouting obscenities in the early morn.

Update 2 - Badlands National Park should be called Bad-A NP

We are now past the second part of our trip and have arrived safely in Wyoming after 2 days in Wall S Dakota. We are now in the coal mining town of Gillette WY and it looks the part. Lets just say not every place in the West is wild and beautiful. Some look like a scene out of “There will be blood” replete with wooden oil rigs, and gritty men who drink oil for breakfast

We have a pool side room at the best western, it looks like they’re set up for a wedding later today, we may have to crash it. But I think we’re pretty quick pick for not local. Sarah was in line at the nearby Subway in Moorcroft when the lady in front of her in line takes one look at Taj’s baby shoes and says, “You’re not from around here are you, we don’t put our baby’s in shoes like that around here.”

The last couple of days have held for us corn palace. You in know you’re in America when they make a large building out of mass quantities of food. There’s no such thing as Rice Palace in Vietnam – it would be gone by dinner. And Wall Drug. Look it up on line – imagine a circus, South of the Border, and a western saloon being mixed in drink shaker and then poured out in the middle of nowhere South Dakota in a town of 818 people.

We also went to Badlands National Park which was amazing, perfect warm air and breezes blowing over wind swept prairies and sandstone castles in the pink glow of twilight. Look out Louis L’Amour if this psychiatrist doesn’t work out I’m writing western romance novels. We saw pronghorn antelope, two herd of bighorn sheep and a lone bison. It was pretty amazing.

Taj is becoming quite the pool rat at the hotel scene having now swum in two pools. And yes these were not ools b/c he definitely put some “P” in the “ool”.

Tomorrow its on to Montana, home at last. Home on the range that is… where the deer and the antelope play, where seldom is heard except a screaming one year old and a panting dog…

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Update 1: Westward Bound

So we made it to Minnesota and crossed the Mississippi river all with very few mishaps. Except for a brief navigation argument outside of Chicago, we've all been pretty happy.
Our days usually begin around 6 AM w/ Taj waking up and smacking us as he is sleeping betwixt us. If we're lucky we can keep him happy w/ sitting in bed smacking us for about 30 minutes at which time that no longer does the trick and we get up.
I usually at that point take Sadie for a walk around the hotel - depending on the hotel this can be quite interesting. Our first hotels were red roof inns which were fairly colorful affairs. At the RRI (for those who are in the "inn")this morning, strewn around the parking lot there was a random gas grill, a cooler, and a car door in a parking space and lots of construction workers smoking. But we were rebated a portion of our room fee because our "non-smoking" room obviously was not. So we stayed in Chicago for $50.

Our first night out was actually at the nicer of the 2 RRI’s in a small town called Bay Village, OH. We found a dogs allowed beach and sadie and taj enjoyed the water as the sunset - it was a pretty nice night.

Back to our typical daily routine –

After wake up, I usually spend 30 to 40 minutes reloading the car. Sarah denies it but I swear her rock collection made the trip again judging by the weight of her one bag.

We usually sing songs for the first 30 minutes and that’s when first nap time hits. Then we can listen to the i-pod, or if that gets old country music (The radio in our nations heartland play both kinds of music – blues and country). Today we caught the first half of the world cup match but then lost reception - I think something about all the cow manure and chicken vapors in Minnesota must interfere w/ radio signals.

One major thunder storm later, we arrived in Fairmount, threw a life jacket on Taj and took him in the hotel pool. Sadie meanwhile proceeded to bark from within her cage letting everyone know that she was not the allowed "small pet" that the hotel thought she was but something much larger. No worries. I think as we are one of four paying customers tonight as long as we don't let her crap in the lobby we should be ok.

After swimming in the pool, Taj demonstrated that the hotel should be more worried about 1 yr old inflicted damages than anything my chocolate lab would have done.

We are hoping that nap time number two sets in shortly - aka bed time - the bathrooms at the comfort inn are bigger than redroof and the crib should fit in the bathroom area. We're hoping that we can get away with him sleeping in the bathroom. In which case if Sarah and I have to go to the bathroom instead of Sadie crapping in lobby...well you get the picture...

So thats the news from lake wobegone, Munjal style.