We had planned to just ride the carousel in Missoula and move on, but I discovered there was a convenient Holiday Inn downtown that had a pool for the kids, accepted dogs and I had points for a free night. I signed up for an IHG credit card before we left on this trip and got enough points for 4 – 5 free hotel nights. The challenge is to find places that both accept points for free nights and allow dogs. Taking a shower and sleeping in a bed after camping and hiking always feels luxurious. I’ll be curious to see what our ratio of tent nights to hotel nights will be for this trip. So far 3 nights camping to 1 night in a hotel.
Downtown Missoula feels a lot like a smaller Spokane to me: the carousel has the same style, a river runs through the town, the buildings seem to have a similar style. The carousel here goes a lot faster though. Geneveve was scared by it and only calmed down when someone who worked there came and stood next to here. She rode again, but the 2nd time on a stationary bench. The playground next to the carousel is perhaps even more fun for kids.
One thing Kim and I have always enjoyed about Montana is you can bring kids into any place that serves alcohol. On the walk to a brewery for dinner we went past a distillery and stopped in for a drink for some fun cocktails. The brewer was pretty typical bar food, but it was pretty good and I ordered the huge Keg Top Nachos to share which are literally served on the top of a keg. By chance the symphony in the park was happening as we walked back from dinner, so we stopped by that for about an hour to round out the evening.
Cleaned and refreshed we headed out for another rough night of camping, this time at hot springs. Aren’t we rugged? Xena took what we’re pretty sure is her longest car nap ever of 4 hours. We weren’t 100% sure where we’d end up after leaving Missoula. We had a few possibilities selected and figured we’d stop when it felt right. We ended up just driving as far as we could while Xena slept, so that brought us to Challis hot springs. There were
some great thunder and lightning storms during the drive so we questioned whether tent camping would work once we got there, but it was just windy at the hot springs so we setup camp.
The hot springs had two pools, one large swimming pool sized pool that was somewhere in the 90’s for temperature, and one smaller pool that was supposed to be much warmer but wasn’t the night we arrived. It had warmed up the next morning though so that we could only spend about 10 minutes in it before getting out. The kids loved swimming in the warm water, and I think Geneveve made more progress in learning to swim in the few hours there than she did in the last few years of pool swim lessons. She’s still not ready to go to the deep end by herself, but she can almost doggy paddle and is willing to go underwater.
From here we’ll head into the Sawtooth Wilderness. It’s out of the way for our main route, but we’ve been reading about the area and it sounds like it’s too beautiful to pass up while we’re so close.