2 Adults 2 Kids

On Friday, I found out my next assignment!  We had to choose a list of ten places we wanted to go.  I was really crushed when we got the list and Japan wasn’t on there.  However, when life gives you lemons…..

Long story short — We’re moving to Korea!!!  Someone told me “It’s just like Japan, only dirtier.”  We’re all super excited.  We plan to use Korea for a launching pad to Asia.  We’d like to go to Japan, China, and Thailand!!

Woohooo!

Wow!

So I was setting up another blog and I ran across this one!

So we eventually we had to leave Glacier National Park. A reader of our blog had suggested that we travel to Bozeman hot spring and Butte. I was pretty psyched about taking the advice of a complete stranger, and I was surprised that CM seemed to be going for it as well. About 200 miles later our RV broke down.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it did break. We lost our turbo. So we’re on the highway, it’s just us and two other cars and we couldn’t go faster than 40 mph! The only way we could get some speed was to pull over to the shoulder and restart the car. I happened to be driving that day and it didn’t really bother me so much. I was more excited about Bozeman/Butte. I agreed to just drive through Bozeman thinking we could catch the hot springs at Yosemite instead, but I had Googled Butte and they had some awesome museums I wanted to go to. However, CM insisted that we should go get the turbo fixed ASAP. I was pretty furious at the time, but in hindsight he was definitely right.

Our RV is built on a Dodge Sprinter van chassis. As it happened, in the ENTIRE state of Montana, there was only one Dodge Sprinter dealer…ONE!! The good news was that we weren’t too far away from it. The bad news was that it was in the opposite direction of Butte. I was sooo disappointed. So naturally that day I didn’t feel like blogging that day either because I had planned to say, “Thanks for the suggestion, we had a great time! We did this, this, and this, etc.”

So we park at Wal-Mart and drive the last 20 miles or so to the dealer. The owner was a really nice guy. Unfortunately, he tells us that it’s going to 4 days to get the broken part in. There was no way we could camp in his parking lot in that small town for 4 days. We called the Winnebago factory (since that was our next big stop) and they suggested another Dodge dealer for us in Iowa. This guy told us that we might be able to make it Iowa if we didn’t have to go through any more hills, so CM and I decided to take our chances.

We made it to Yosemite the next day and we only had to restart the car a handful of times. There’s only one word to describe our time there: Crazy!

We were at Glacier National Park for only 3 days, but so much happened. I just need to share a few more things and then I will move on to the calamity that struck us after we left.

At the park if you’re vehicle was over 20′ long you had to take a shuttle bus up to the glaciers. This ride took over an hour. The scenery was beautiful, but what really caught my eye was this guy sitting across the aisle and 1 row in front of me.

He was middle-aged and had this Indiana Jones like hat and he was very very tan with a mustache and a beard. He was wearing hiking boots and a fleece sweater, and his eyes were strikingly blue. I also noticed that he was missing a finger on one of his hands. This guy seemed like he was right off the pages of a book on exploring. He could have been an extra in “3:10 to Yuma”.

Anyhoo, we got off at our stop and I never even glanced back at the stranger. Once we got on the trail, CM jumped and made a little noise. I realized that he was standing 3 feet away from a deer! We all scrambled to get our cameras out. I got one shot of him and I think CM got some video. The kids were so giddy.

We knew this was the start to a great hike. (Mind you, we didn’t know at that time that we would be out there for 4 hours.) About 10 minutes later we turned a curve and we saw the guy from the bus. He was sitting down in the forest eating something. To my horror, Widget asked him what he was eating. He said he was picking huckleberries and eating them.

Huckleberries. I don’t know about you, but I have never eaten anything that just happened to be growing along side of a trail. I didn’t know what to say when he offered Widget a handful, but I decided to throw caution to the wind. This guy looked like he’d done this before and if he said they were okay to eat, he was probably right. (I mean, I know that huckleberries are edible, but my concern was that he had misidentified the plant.)

So I totally broke Rule #1 in my “Parental Playbook” — Don’t take food from strangers! This entire experience, from the day that I listed all of our stuff for sale on Craigslist, has really changed the way I view strangers. I have met so many new and interesting people. People that I would have never met had I would have stayed in that little box of an apartment. I walked through a forest and I stopped every now and then to eat friggin wild huckleberries! Yeah, “Old KJ” would have been terrified at the idea and that makes me happy and let’s me know that all of this was worth it.

After we left Glacier Park, disaster struck. I’ll tell you about it next time.

I had really been feeling like the trip was a bust. I had wanted to show the kids all of these different things and they really weren’t too interested. CM and I were feeling that we spent more time with our back on them (because we were driving) than we did when we had an apartment. Some days it seemed like the only time that we really talked to them was to tell them “Stop hitting” or “Share!” I really felt that the hike in Montana really changed that.

We really bonded as a family on that mountain. They tell you to make noise when you’re hiking so that you don’t surprise the bears. So, the kids and I were singing as loud as we could. At times I had to motivate Widget to keep walking because he was too big too carry. Sometimes Widget had to motivate me because I was too big to carry.

At one point on the trail, we started thinking about turning back. We had been out there with no end in sight and the last shuttle bus left our trail area in 3 hours. CM wanted to continue on for 45 minutes and if we didn’t see a sign he thought we should turn around. At this point trail curved steeply upward and Widget decided that he wanted to turn around. I couldn’t breathe after carrying Midget for ten paces, so I wanted to turn around. I think that when we finally saw some other hikers. They told us we only had a mile and a half to go. I was happy and PO’d at the same time. I thought this thing was only a mile and a half to begin with!

When we finally reached the road we were all so excited. We had this feeling of “We did it and not only did we do it, but we did it as a family!” I don’t think even Midget will forget that day. When I was writing that post the other day I had to go through photos to find one to post. As soon as she saw the pics she said, “Mommy, I don’t want to go to the forest.” CM & I both laughed.

Two words: Pure exhaustion. At the time of my last post, we were having terrible problems getting any kind of internet signal and we were headed to Glacier National Park in Montana. Well, when we got there what we thought was a 1.5 mile hike, turned out to be a 4.5 mile hike (thank you, CM).

In case you didn’t know, it’s not a good idea to take a 3 year-old on a 4.5 mile hike! What made things worse was the fact that it was steadily uphill. I thought we were going for a scenic walk, not climbing up the side of a friggin mountain! Because we thought the trail was so short, we stuck with it because we thought, “any minute this thing is going to turn back down hill”. Once we got deep into the forest, we didn’t see any other hikers, so I really started to freak out. By the way, did I mention that there was a gigantic “Grizzly Country” sign at the trailhead?

So, I would say at about 2 miles in Midget flat out refused to walk. CM & I took turns carrying her on our shoulders up a mountain. About 3 hours later, we got to the top of the mountain. I’m not going to lie, it was soooo beautiful, but I was so out of breath and so scared that a bear was going to eat me that I didn’t enjoy it as much.

I don’t know how long our downhill trip took. We practically ran, even Midget. When we finally broke out of the trees I was so thankful. That night I intended to blog about everything that had happened. However, when we got back to the RV, we microwaved some TV dinners and we all passed out from exhaustion. I woke up in the middle of the night in terrible pain. My legs were throbbing, it hurt if I bent them, it hurt if I stretched them out. It took everything I had to not fall as I climbed down the latter to get some Tylenol. About 45 minutes later I was sound asleep.

That day started a downhill spiral for CM and I. We were constantly on the go and we never got any rest. For me, the first thing to go was the blog. Taking care of the kids and planning a trip on the go was more than enough to fill my plate.

Luckily we made it back safely, and I have so much to tell you.