We’ve spent most of the past week visiting our friends Laura and Eric near Whitefish Montana. This will be the last week I’m working before my two months of time off begin and I don’t need Internet access all day. In fact, as I type this I’ve just finished my last day of work before said time off, so this was my last week working for awhile. Woot! I still almost can’t believe that I’ve been able to work from so many places, but really more can’t believe that most people still go into offices everyday. There’s things I miss about working in an office, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to go back to full time office work after working from home or wherever there’s Internet the last few years.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve found the only way to get sufficient time to connect and catch up with friends is to spend multiple days with them since everybody’s lives are so busy. Laura and Eric are no exception since they both work full time, have a 1 year old and on the side they’re adding an addition to their house. Themselves. Well, Laura’s dad is helping a lot and providing most of the knowledge and a lot of the labor, but it’s not like they’re hiring contractors who build up the addition while they’re at work. So we’ve been helping a bit with the building on the weekend and evenings, and then we have a bit of time in the late evening to hang out after construction and putting all the kids to bed by which point everybody is rightfully tired. Building my own house is one of those romantic notions that sounds nice in theory, but really I think it’s more fun to help someone else do it a bit and then not have it be my problem.
The current house is pretty small: 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom and a loft. And we’re not the only company visiting, so we’ve been sleeping in the garage and occasionally in a lookout tower nearby (more on that later). So another of our gradual transitions for this trip has been going from our own house, to my parents’ house, to a rental house, to a house full of people without a lot of space. Hopefully these transitions are helping the kids (and us) adjust to a new kind of life. We’ll soon see how the transition to our whole family in a car and tent goes.
There’s a lookout tower at the top of a nearby hill that Geneveve and I have slept in a few nights, and it’s really cool. You can see a few of the peaks from Glacier park, and all the way down to Kalispel. At night we’d hoped to see more stars, but it was a full moon one night, and the next night smoke from a fire in the area (perhaps hundreds of miles away) obscured the view. I’ve also been taking Xena up there for naps since it’s a nice 20 minute hike with a bed to lay down in at the top.
It’s been hot here like everywhere else this summer, so we’ve been finding places to cool off and swim. Whitefish has a nice town beach, and we were even able to pull Laura and Eric away from the house
project for an evening to go there and take some canoe rides. We’ve been a bit spoiled by the beach at Sandpoint this last month, which is easily the nicest public beach on a mountain lake that I know of (did I get enough qualifiers in there?), so we were surprised at how rocky and shallow the area around the Whitefish beach was. But still great for a swim for us and the dog.
We’ll be leaving our friend’s house tomorrow and finding somewhere to camp, probably to the east of Flathead lake. We’ve got some rough itineraries planned out, but we’ve intentionally left things loose in terms of planning so that we can adjust as needed. We were looking at stopping at hotsprings more, but lately have decided it might be a bit too hot outside for that as a focal destination. We’ll probably more be looking for places we can camp and swim in refreshing lakes. I’m sure there will be occasional hotel stops to get cleaned up and wash clothes. Whatever we do, I’m excited to be on the road traveling again.