Happy Birthday, Jean!
We left Theodore Roosevelt National Park at 8 am this morning. We are getting good at packing up our gear. Like a well oiled machine. We originally planned to stop
at Makoshika State Park but since it's only an hour and a half away, I convinced Ed to go there on the way home instead. We still have about 13 hours of driving before we reach Two Medicine Campground at Glacier National Park. This is one of our main stops. Glacier is really beautiful!
About 10am or so we stop for breakfast at CC's Family Cafe. Great breakfast. We seem to find great local diners along the way.
We travel on Rt 94 for awhile and turn onto Route 200. Two lane quiet road. Maybe it's quiet because it's Sunday morning and everyone is at church.
This part of Montana is sparsely populated. Lots of farms with hay or something growing. Well spaced ranches with lots of cattle. Pretty flat, too.
We have 2 GPS's. One on the car and one that Ed uses for hiking and with our Trip program in the computer. Sometimes, however, they conflict with how to get where we are going. Today, however, they seem to be sending us the same way---but it's on a dirt road for what it says is 12 miles. Ed's map is calling it Highway 252. That liberty with the word Highway! Sure is an adventure!
We've been on here awhile. I think we are beyond the word adventure for this part of the trip. Now we have been on 16 miles of a one lane dirt road. Ed is freaking out. I'm trying to make lite of it and he's thinking about broken axles and not being able to turn around.
We've gone another 5 miles or so and I am afraid I am joining Ed on freaking out. The road is getting more narrow and the ruts in the road are deeper. I don't know what we're going to do if we hit a patch we get stuck in. We don't have a shovel.
We went another mile, went to a dip in the roadway with lots of divots. They weren't all solid at that point but we didn't realize it. Ed plowed through...or tried to, anyway. You guessed it. The tires got stuck in almost a foot of muck....and it didn't smell good either. We were definitely in a pickle.
We got out and Ed assessed things. Then he tried to back up as far as he could but by then the camper was making a sharp turn so we had to stop. We had to take the camper off the truck, use 4W & 4L back and forth to move the truck beyond the muddy holes we made. The problem now is the camper is on one side of this muck and the truck is on the other.
Now we had to move the camper to face forward so we can try to reattach it to the truck. Given the weight of the tongue of the camper, that's not as easy as it sounds! Ed got the wheel on the tong of the camper and tried to move it. No go. Then we put a line of boards to one side of the wheel and he was able to push it along as I kept moving the boards. Once it was forward facing again, he had to find a drier side of the road to back the truck up to it.
I have never been so scared in my life. This was far more then an adventure. Ed was right to be freaking out. Once we were out of the mud, we still had 5 miles or so to go on this path with no idea if we were going to come across another problem. I'd like to tell you what town we were near during this adventure, but there are no town names on the map. There are no houses ANYWHERE to be seen.
Thank God!!! I think I have found religion!! We made it out to State Hwy 24. Now we need to travel another 30 miles or so to get to Fort Peck to camp. It's completely devoid of any signs of life. There are high tension wires along the ridge and wire fencing on either side of the road but NOTHING else. If we had gotten stuck a little more in that muck, I have no clue how we would have gotten out of there. It would have been at least 35 miles to go to get help! Walk??? Take the bike and leave back at the truck in the middle of no where??? And would AAA even consider coming out to get us??? Scary to even think about!
And by the way...there certainly was no cell service!
I'm ready to stop for the day and it's only 12:30!
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