Tonight I am sitting in a possibly slightly sketchy hotel in Missoula, Montana waiting for a pizza delivery guy to show up. It is 9 pm. The last time we officially fed our children was 12 hours ago in Rexburg, Idaho when we dined on everything that was left in the kitchen of our rental house, so: eggs, tortillas, cheese, pancake mix, s'mores, popsicles, and an assortment of cow's milk, almond milk and soy milk. But Noah bought a doughnut at the last truck stop we were at and there was totally fruit, nuts AND popcorn available in the car, though mostly they didn't eat it. Today's adventures were fabulous, but not exactly well choreographed. It is probably about a 4 1/2 hour drive from Rexburg to Missoula and we made it into more like ten hours. But that was because there was a ghost town to visit on the way that was just a little bit out of our way in one direction and then there were ringing rocks to visit a little bit out of the way in another direction. So we had to go. To both.
We learned about Bannack, Montana from a guide book left behind in our Idaho rental house. A ghost town with over 60 intact buildings that we could go inside! We had to go. Probably we should have brought lunch. Sixty buildings take a long time to explore and photograph. Ok, you can only actually go inside around thirty. Maybe forty. Bannack is a state park, we paid an $8 entrance fee for all of us and got a guide book that described most of the buildings and told quite a bit of the history of the town. Even given the total lack of suitable nourishment since 9 am, and the fact that it was now past noon, everyone seemed pretty intent on exploring every closet, vault, outhouse, and creepy cellar they could wedge their way into.
The original plan for today did not include a ghost town though, it was to be a four and a half hour drive with a stop halfway to see the ringing rocks outside of Butte, Montana. Ringing rocks are exactly what the name implies, rocks that actually ring! We had heard that they ring when hit with a hammer or a wrench, we tried both, plus a tire iron and a couple other tools that were in the back of the car, but only the hammers worked. Also, when I saw that the site in Montana was only about twenty miles from Butte (in the completely wrong direction to be going to Missoula), my brain thought "twenty minute detour," but it was not so! The last 5 of those twenty miles was on a *very* rough, very narrow road. In fact, we eventually abandoned our Pilot at a slight pullout and hiked the remaining half mile. So our twenty mile detour probably took closer to an hour than twenty minutes, AND before we even finished our half mile hike, the wind began to seriously pick up and whip the gravel around viciously at us in preparation for the rainstorm that chased us back down the road to our car later. But first we found that pile of rocks and some of us climbed all over them searching for the best tones we could find.
We made it back down that treacherous road, the sun returned, we bravely ignored the desire to drive over and see what on earth that giant tower in the middle of the mountains was (but I did look it up-- the Anaconda Smelter Stack, next time maybe), and here we are, eating pizza straight from the box perched on our hotel beds at 10 pm.
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