Waiting for Registration Plates

We have started moving north and hope to reach Glacier National Park in a few days. We are in our first RV park with hook ups, so the hot water and fridge change from gas to electric. We have our electric fire on; how do they make those flames? Washing is on and dinner is being prepared by my live-in chef. Life is good.

After leaving Yellowstone we decided we needed some R&R, life’s tough I know but you can’t just keep going indefinitely. We needed some time out from all the hub hub of buying and setting up our new way of life. Yellowstone just kept up the pace as we felt we needed to be out there every day looking for wildlife.

When Lindsay got tired from driving, we found a Montana State park right on Flathead Lake near Big Fork, not far from Kalispell – a large enough town to support a Super Walmart and Costco. The campground was called Wayferers and we lobed in there without a reservation and found a campsite before we asked if it was all right to stay. All but four in sites the campground were reservable but as no-one had booked ours we could stay for three days, we later moved to a non reservable site so that we could keep adding nights. There was a lot of greenery, tree cover, blue sky, birds singing, a lake near by, what else could we want? Perfect.

The campground can get a bit noisy on the weekends as the locals come and camp - from the town just down the road!

On the way up we had checked with Karen to see if she had received the two MSO’s (Manufacturers State of Origin) for our vehicles, which were required for registration. Yes for the truck, no for the trailer. So we chased it up and were told it would be there on Monday. It arrived on time, so now Karen had to go to the department of motor vehicles to register our vehicles and get their plates. She didn’t get them on Tuesday as the line was too long. Okay, so how long was this going to take? It only just dawned on us that we needed to get our plates now because we couldn’t go into Canada with temporary registration plates. We needed to stay in one place so that we could get our registration plates posted to us. We couldn’t have been in a better spot. The camp hosts wanted to give us a job as co-hosts but we declined, although Lindsay was tempted. In hindsight, we should have organized the plates to go to Columbia Falls near Glacier NP, but we weren’t thinking that logically. It usually takes 1-2 days for express post, but we weren’t in a major town, so it took four. The post office is open on Saturdays and as we thought it would be risky to move camp sites on a Saturday night, the weekend before the 4th of July we stayed put until Sunday. Our quiet campground that night was full and quite noisy, with most of the campers only from the town five minutes away!

Glacier NP wasn’t far away and we thought we would get there fairly early. What we didn’t count on was a low railway bridge obstructing the main entrance. Two inches clearance was just too risky. Having a MacDonald’s with the lot home on wheels has its disadvantages. I asked at the local fuel station if there was an alternative route. There was, but the short story is that we ended up on a dirt corrugated road. This was not doing our new home any good or Lindsay’s patience because of course it was all my fault that we were on this road (LOL), so we turned around after some time and found an RV park. I learned a lesson: always ask what the roads are like and do they think we should be driving a 5th Wheeler on it. We wasted most of the day.