Day 17: Craters of the Moon & Missoula, MT

We woke up at a decent hour again and had everything ready to go fairly quickly. We had leftover donuts from the day before that made for a good quick breakfast. When we were packing everything back in the trailer it just didn’t want to fit right. While trying to figure it out I got hot and took off my long-sleeve shirt, knocking out my earring. Now this was upsetting because these earrings mean something to me, so Devin and I had about a 15 minute delay as we searched around on the ground for the missing earring. I had found the back to the earring in the trailer, and after some searching the earring turned up on the ground (and in the meantime I had lost the back to it so I had to pack them away until I could get a replacement back.

Craters of the Moon National Monument is just south of where we stayed. We didn’t anticipate it being a very involved sightsee so we headed down. We were very surprised when we got there. Craters of the Moon is a huge lava field 2,000-15,000 years old (some volcanoes are older and some younger). They had excellent short walking paths all around the area. These huge black rocks, some smooth and some coarse are everywhere. You’re driving along next to cattle fields and ‘boom’ there is this instant change in the landscape of black rock. While we were there we climbed a cinder cone:

Can you see the mini-b?

We also went into a lava tube, a cave of lava rock that used to hold molten lava. It was at this time that our phones (which we take pictures with ) promptly died and we had left the cameras in the bike. But it was awesome none-the-less. It was getting hot and we were getting tired so we went back to Arco, got gas and lunch, and ate at their town park. We got down the road about 10 miles or so before I realized I had forgotten to secure the water hose. Again. It took a ride along the highway. Again…
We were driving into lots of smoke. It kept getting more and more smoky, but it helped keep the sun off of us. We made it to a small town and stopped for gas and a break. We headed to the Napa next door to get some oil for the bike. The guys in there were really nice and warned us of some construction up ahead. We talked to them for a while, and one had said he had just come back from the “Teste Feste” (testicle festival) in Missoula, where we were headed.

We had some beautiful riding along our way, right alongside the Salmon River. We crossed over the 45^th parallel (half-way between the equator & north pole). Then we hit…more unpaved road!!! We sat in construction for about 20 minutes and were on an incline so Devin couldn’t put the kickstand down. But the weather was nice and the riding great. We made it to Salmon, ID which is the birthplace of Sacajawea. We kept going north, seeing a few deer and then… A peacock. It was on the side of the road! We honked and hollered and it didn’t move. It seemed to be wild too, it was at a part that was public road, not private land.

The farther we went north the colder it got. By the time we made it to the KOA we had decided to get a Kamping Kabin; small 12x12 cabins that have 2 bunk beds, a shelf, and a heater. One bunk bed the bottom bunk is a full size. They come with small mattresses but you have to use your own sheets. Because we wrap our sheets up with our air mattress we chose to just use our air mattress and switched out theirs for ours. Other than we were REALLY close to the bunk above us it worked out pretty well. We were also next door to the bathrooms which was awesome.

After checking in we went to eat pasta at a place called Johnny Carinos. The waitress there was incredibly nice and talked us up (even though we came in near closing time), giving us some travel hints for our trip to Glacier National Park and later to Oregon. I had an amazing minestrone soup and Devin loved his spaghetti and meatballs & Italian sausage. They make everything right there (including the sausage) and he really raved about how good they were. It was nice to go back to a cabin with a heater.

Today we traveled 339.4 miles for a total of 4537.4 miles across America.