The Forest AND The Trees

Well, first impressions can surely be wrong! On our second full day of driving through Lewis and Clark National Forest we saw both the forest and the trees- millions of them (conservatively!) I hadn’t realized that the plains were going to give way to the mountains and that was part of the park…, uh, forest. So an hour or so into the day and a climb of several thousand more feet in elevation we were in the thick of things- beautifully large and straight pine trees and the patches of snow we had been looking at from down below. Perhaps the expression should be, more correctly, “We hadn’t seen the forest for the mountains.” The same was true coming down the other side. We abruptly left the mountain and the forest and the trees and moved back on to the high plain. The change in topography was swift and certain and more than a little surprising.

Back on the mountain, though, we had stopped at the summit to play in the snow and a snowball fight was part of the agenda. The snow was still soft and fresh and balled up easily so….I wonder how long that little snowman will last.

Before leaving the summit, we talked for a while with the only other RV-ers who had happened along and stopped where we had stopped. It was a couple who lives in Alaska (our destination point) who were vacationing with their teenage grand-daughter who was from, of all places, Port Charlotte, Florida, just a stone’s throw up the road from our Cape Coral, Florida home base - proving once again: It’s a small world, after all. Everybody sing!

This post is made on our last day in the states for some time to come, as we will be entering Canada in the morning. Hopefully we have a working balance between preparation and trepidation, the known and the adventurous. Anticipation is the battery charger of life and we are running on full….