Day 11: Montana and the Idaho Panhandle

The crack in our windshield slowly grew as we headed west towards Washington, causing some consternation. When we stopped in Butte to take pictures of Our Lady of the Rockies (the fourth tallest statue in the US), Kelly and I switched, and while I drove, she looked up places where the windshield might be fixed.

With all places that offered a full replacement booked up, and with others not having spares for the right car model, Kelly finally found a few people in Missoula who would be able to make a temporary fix. The process was fascinating. The mechanic drilled a hole at the end of the crack to keep it from spreading further (and another one right next to it when, through this intervention, it did). He then filled it and the entire crack with some kind of resin, which made the crack less visible, temporarily covering the crack with leaves of plastic to help it dry. Once that was done, he scraped off the dried excess, which blew away in the wind like snow. Taking only 49 dollars (a sum that I thought was quite modest given how much trouble this might have given us), he drove off in his massive crimson truck like a hero, with his dog perched on the passenger’s seat and leaning out of the window.

A view down the road in Montana

Our Lady of the Rockies

A view of Butte

The two of us at our overlook of Butte

The rest of our time in Missoula would have been completely unremarkable had we not come across the last Cracker Barrel we would see on this trip. Swayed by the power of roadside advertisements in the south, we had been dreaming of the new cheesecake-pancake for so long that it became a mythical object in our imaginations. Was it a pancake filled with cheesecake? Was it a cheesecake with a pancake base? The culinary mystery had to be solved. As we devoured the object of our speculations in the nearby parking lot, we found the answer to be more prosaic and somewhat disappointing: it was just a pancake filled with cream cheese (and not too much of it at that).

We only made two brief stops in the Idaho panhandle. The first was at the Old Mission State Park in Cataldo, home to the oldest house in the state. Built in the 1850s, the Sacred Heart Church is a quirky place in that it was built without nails and some of its interior was painted using huckleberries. The second stop was in Coeur d’Alene, where we quickly walked along the lake before jumping back in the car again and driving on.

The interior of the Old Mission

The apse

The same

A better view of the blue ceiling

The exterior of the Old Mission

The same from the front

The parish house

The same from the front

Plastic chairs overlooking Coeur d'Alene Lake

A boat on the lake

The shore

By Coeur d'Alene Lake

To free up space in the car, Kelly returned one of our sleeping bags and our two mats in Spokane. We had originally planned to use them on two nights, but we agreed after the first night in Grand Teton that we would not return to our original accommodation for round two. The rough lodging had left us too tired the next day, and it was more convenient to spend the second night further northwest than returning to the south. After another two hours, we arrived at our lodgings in a town in the centre of Washington, whose name we found simply delightful: it is called George.

We drove 559 miles today, swinging over another thousandth mark to a total of 4369.