Mississippi Bound Uh oh it's raining!

July 6

We awoke early to the sounds of water on the road. Cars driving past made that dreaded shhulshh noise of tires fording water. This is not a big deal if you’re in a car, but not much fun on a motorcycle. And there were predictions of thunder and lightning. Avoidance is sometimes a good policy, so we hung out in our hotel room for an hour or so prolonging our departure in hopes of a weather change. No luck.

I put on nearly every item of clothes I brought and covered my legs with my pair waterproof rainpants. I feel like they should be bright yellow, but they’re black.

The Idaho panhandle is 75 miles across following I-90. As we wend past Coeur ’d’ Alene I remembered hikes at various places, bays where we waterskied, swam and sunbathed. Not in this rapidly dropping temperature, though. The motorcycle has a thermometer which read 62° as we climbed toward 4th of July Pass. The rain continued. The temperature fell. We passed Smelterville, a town I remember from my childhood as a neighbor had grown up there and I thought it such a funny name for a town. The neighbor, Joy her name was, trained her cats to jump through hoops and roll over. She used to put shows on for the kids in the neighborhood.

Speeding along, I was more than chilly as the temperature which was already cool dropped to 51° at Lookout Pass at the Idaho-Montana border. Also, we lost an hour. Montana is such stunning country--the pristine streams with deer at the edge.

You know you’re in Montana when billboards proclaim Lucky Lil’s Casinos and the annual Testicle Festival (check it out at http://www.testyfesty.com/)held at the end of July in Clinton.

For some reason Arlo is drawn to Butte, Montana which I find to be dreary. We stayed at the Finlen Hotel in a dark, poorly equipped room in the historic uptown portion of Butte. Sure, there are plenty of formerly elegant homes posted as being on the National Historic Registry, but that has a huge downside because once on that list, the building can’t be improved unless the renovations follow specific guidelines that comply with the design of the original time of construction. That is expensive. Therefore the homes and shops fall further and further into disrepair.

This entire day I have not thought about Mississippi once.