After a damp night’s sleep we loaded up our car and headed toward Yellowstone. We knew we’d have a long drive and did not opt to take the ferry since we’d join the interstate at the southern end of the sound. Our trip took us across Washington through Spokane. Both of us had an instant craving for pizza but we were in rural Washington. Through the magic of the iPhone we ordered some Papa John’s outside of Spokane and timed it ready for pickup on the way through.
After picking up the pizza, I gave up the reins for the first time on our trip out west, aside from the test drive Jayne got in Custer State Park. The sun had just gone down and Jayne was driving 75 through the Bitterroots in Idaho. There were lots of trucks going uphill at about 45 MPH and Jayne was dodging in and out of them. She just said, “I feel like I’m on an obstacle course.”
With Missoula being a smaller town, few hotels were available on Hotwire so we took what we could get. The roulette wheel landed on some very generic looking hotel on Broadway. When we rolled up around midnight, the first thing we saw was a girl stumbling around on a grassy patch in the parking lot, pulling her pants up. After seeing bare ass and checking in, we pulled around back to get to our room. There were multiple people sitting in their cars. Just sitting there. Before seeing the interior, we decided this was some sort of hangout for johns or something.
I emailed the Daniels family for an update on our eventual arrival in to Denver sometime later and we went to bed. The next morning with our only perception of Missoula being the apparent bordello we were staying at, we thought, “Let’s get the hell out of this town.” But Emily had already responded to my late night email and gave us a laundry list of things we could do in Missoula. We were really just thinking of Missoula as a layover close to Yellowstone but we did have actual laundry and we had some suggestions from someone we trusted.
Since we weren’t going off any sort of real schedule we decided to wing it in Missoula. We found a laundromat with wifi and set up our base there. While Jayne watched laundry, I went to the Staggering Ox. This is much like a Jimmy John’s except their sandwich ingredients are stuffed inside a loaf of bread baked in a coffee can. It wasn’t as good as it sounds. Weeks later on this trip, Jayne would still bring up the sandwich I had. Looking at it unsettled her and she sometimes would claim she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Across the street was an Albertson’s so we replenished our cooler. Jayne went inside to start on the list and I started moving things from the back of the car to dig the cooler out of its spot. I walked up to some shrubs and placed the cooler in the shrubs to drain the water. At this point we were pretty low on ice. Like everything on this trip, we replenished the ice whenever. If we were at a hotel where it was easy to fill up a 48 quart cooler, we did. In Canada, we paid $6 for 14 pounds of ice. We bought some at Albertson’s but I didn’t ask Jayne how much this one set us back. The Sanderson in me doesn’t want to know what I just paid for frozen water.
We rolled our cart out to the parking lot and started to take out everything but the base of the cooler (bottled waters, milk, Diet Cokes, Cokes and Koolaid Jammers). We organized the waterlogged jams and condiments with the cheeses and butter tub and surrounded the milks and juices and lunch meats with plenty of ice. As we were doing this, the cart collection boy strolled up and said, “Going camping?” This opened the door for him to carry on one of the best (one-sided) conversations I’ve ever had with someone. Jayne wrote a lot of it down as soon as he left and I will block quote that right now if I may.
In an Albertson’s parking lot in Missoula, MT, while Zach packed up the cooler, we made the acquaintance of a cart return boy. He was a most astonishing young man. He told us that he personally had met Barack Obama twice, and that Barack Obama is from Chicago, and that he, too, is from Chicago.
Upon learning that we were going camping in Yellowstone he let us know that one of the times he met President Obama was when Obama flew a 747 into Yellowstone. The young gentleman had also been at Yellowstone just last night, with his mom. They saw 17 bears.
“Excuse me,” a woman in the car next to us yelled. “Can you move these carts?” The carts the young man had been pushing were left in front of her car. When the young man made no response, Zach grabbed the carts and held them out of her way.
“Gotta stabilize ‘em like that,” the young man said, approving of Zach’s method.
Finally, upon learning that we are from the great state of Iowa, he informed us of yet another amazing coincidence – his father is the governor of Iowa, and his uncle is head coach of the football team there. He enlarged upon this last fact with some information shared with him by his cousin in Iowa, but I did not hear this part, because I was hiding in the car because I was laughing too much.
I have nothing to add except that his cousin in Iowa was in fact the Nebraska basketball coach. And…despite meeting Barack Obama multiple times he seemed most astonished that upon seeing 17 bears in Yellowstone that they just let you park in the middle of the road!! I’ve heard of pulling to the side but parking in the middle of the road?! Unbelievable!