Kissing Elk

Fortunately, this story turned out OK. While in the middle of filming this Christmas Day stunt, I imagined that things could go terribly wrong.

This is the "Hooved Animal Enclosure" in Fleming Park at Lake Jacomo. They started Buffalo and Elk herds here years ago when an Elk with a radio tag that was from northern Wyoming wandered all the way down here and was captured by some local animal control people before he got hit on the highway. Somehow, they got him a mate and started a herd. I've gone out to visit them for years.

They used to have signs that said not to feed them, now the signs just say not to feed them anything but carrots and apples and a few other fruits and vegetables. I remember reading the sign last time I was over at the Buffalo pen and it said not to feed them bread, it could hurt them. I'm not sure how bread hurts a buffalo, except when it's wrapped around a bison burger.

I wanted to get a daring, kiss the elk pose for this picture, and while I was close to the fence, I started wondering if he could poke an eye out if he wanted to. The actual danger is that he tried to slip me some tongue.

Plummelo Experiment

Have you heard of a Pummelo? They are sometimes called Pomelos.

I saw some in the store and decided to try it. I love Grapefruits, and somehow expected that this was just a big grapefruit on steroids.

When I cut through it, the first thing I noticed was this enormous layer of flesh below the rind. It's like a sponge, like and springy.

The fruit is close enough to Grapefruit that I feel pretty safe in saying that if you like Grapefruit, you'll like Pummelos. A Grapefruit is easier to cut through and take apart, and there seems to be more juice in a Grapefruit.

The essortment.com site's description of the fruit talks about how it is an ancestor to the Grapefruit, mostly grown in Southeast Asia. It says that some people believe the skin can help you with coughing and epileptic seizures. Good luck with that.

Hiding out in the mom cave

Here's Junior again. We're not sure whether he is shy, itching his face, or playing peek-a-boo in this photo. We were not able to get a clear shot this day.

Smiling away in fetusland

Did you know that babies smiled when they were still inside of their mommy's tummies? I did not know that.

By the way, those are not horns, and our baby is not the devil. Although we reserve the right to refute that at some time or times in the future when he is driving us nuts.

Natural Habitat

This is the natural habitat of the larval human.

When tiny, the larval human is helpless and needs careful watching and protection. This involves soft squishy fabrics, soothing colors, and new curtains and wall paint. Without the proper material lining the nest, the baby may never make it to adulthood, or college, which is a form of suspended adolescence that some humans enter rather than going straight to adulthood.

Big Fly

This story reminds me of a horror story, a combination of a Twilight Zone episode and the movie "The Fly".

I was working on my shower and opened up a window that had been shut for quite a long time. Out of the recess in the base of the window came some insects that had not been able to escape up until then.

Some were those new lady bugs. You may have heard of the infestation of Asian Lady Bugs. Here's a description from the University of Kentucky's Entomology Department website: "One species of lady beetle, Harmonia axyridis, can be a nuisance however, when they fly to buildings in search of overwintering sites and end up indoors. Once inside they crawl about on windows, walls, attics, etc., often emitting a noxious odor and yellowish staining fluid before dying." See http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef416.asp if you want to explore information about the Lady Bug, or better yet, if you want to attend the University of Kentucky and become an Entomologist. That's what Gary Larson of The Far Side cartoon fame was.

The other species that was in the window were house flies.

Big deal, right? So what's even worth mentioning house flies? Well, first of all, these flies were enormous. They weren't as big as honey bees, but they were closer to that size than a lady bug. When they flew, they were loud. They put out this annoying buzz you could not ignore.

The strange thing about the flies is that I got a Buddhist reincarnation vibe off of them. Each day, I would go in and there would be one up by the light, buzzing and bumping into the light cover.

I kept a red fly swatter and disposed of the fly as soon as I could.

Every day, without fail, a new fly would be back to replace the one I whacked the day before. What was going on here? Reincarnation? Reanimation? Insect stalking? An entomological conspiracy?

We may never know.

Baby on Board

There's a little baby inside there.

We are looking forward to meeting him when he decides to come out.

Dancing with the Dogs

Those fancy ballroom dancing shows have got nothing on this Thanksgiving driveway scene.

I'm not sure if Bo knows he's not leading.

Turkey Courtship

This guy should feel lucky just to be out of the oven after Thanksgiving.

Instead, he is showing off to one of his lady friends.

Toe Jam Revisited

I talked about my messed up toes when I got back from climbing San Luis last summer.

See the 9/6/08 entry at:

http://wagginganimaltales.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html#2818870327477483661

This is an update. 2½ months in, the black marks on the toes are working their way to the end.

The curious thing about this was the original pattern. I've blackened a toenail before, and it's usually the whole toenail. This time, it was a wedge shaped pattern on the outer edge of the toe.

That was one heck of a mountain climb. I still want to do it again. Andrea thinks the cog train on Pike's Peak should be our next 14er. I agree.

Spider Shower

This morning when I checked out the comics, I got an unexpected laugh.

I admit this is stupid, but for some reason I find it hilarious.

On one hand, it reminds me of my shower. I've had spiders up near the ceiling that I sometimes see when I'm taking a shower. I like spiders, so it's not a big deal, but now I associate spiders with the shower. Just not in a horrifying way like this cartoon.

Are the spiders stunned, asleep, or dead? It seems to me that they'd be webbed out and suspended, not actually flowing out and falling. Unless they were demon spiders intent on inflicting maximum psychological damage.

The other thing I think about is plumbing design. That was my job when I first got out of the military for a few years. I see the delivery of spiders through a shower head as a real plumbing challenge. Someone must have really wanted to prank that soapy shower dude to come up with that kind of plumbing genius.

The Strangest Echo of Childhood

When cleaning out the basement, we came across an old love seat style couch. This old couch smelled really bad. I can't really describe it, "musty" does not do it justice. Musty is usually a mildly offensive smell, like a little of the oxygen is missing and something bad has replaced it.

This was much worse than that. It wasn't like something had died, but it was like the couch had to die.

The problem is that Andrea loves the little love seat. So we planned to re-upholster it "some day".

In the meantime, we were cleaning out the basement, to take the aged smell out, and the couch needed some work. I took it outside and started stripping the old cloth off. There was as strange stuffing that looks like the bird's nest material you see in the bottom of hanging plant baskets and a batting that looked like a cross between a rat's nest and fiberglass insulation.

As I was stripping this material off, I found these deep pockets on the sides where things that come out of your pockets can really find a good hiding place.

Out of this hiding place came a dog-chewed block from my childhood, and a 1967 stamp and 1966 dime, as well as three of the dextroamphetimine pills I used to take for hyperactivity when I was a kid. One was in good enough condition to pull the code off and figure out what they were. I'd wondered that for years.

Sister Golden Cat Delight

The picture does not do justice to this scene.

At the right time in the fall, the sweet gums turn bright yellow. When the sun shines through them just right, the room lights up in a golden glow.

Speedy likes to sit on a fleece pad and look out the window in the bright light.

Election Day

This picture was taken with one hand, while I voted for President with the other.

Golden Arches

There usually comes a time in the fall where the sweet gum trees make a golden yellow canopy over our driveway.

It is usually way too short.

Foggy Fall Foliage

We had thick fog last weekend. It took until mid day before it finally lifted.

A Flash of Fall

Here is a picture I took while driving, trying to document the fall colors.

This driveway has a long line of red oaks on either side of it, but with digital cameras, you don't always get what you want. I tried to time it so the camera would take the picture straight down the driveway, but it fired off early.

I don't understand how the fountain grass is in focus, but the background is a blur. The blur is not focal, it's from motion. It must be a trick of panning the camera perfectly through the motion so the center stays in frame while the outside moves in or out of center.

I like the result.

Environmental Emissions

When the trash truck came up to our office's dumpster last week, it started to leak some kind of fluid while it was stopped in our parking lot.

This stuff was jet black and nasty looking. Nick opened his window right as it started and yelled at them to make it stop. The two guys working the trash truck didn't seem overly concerned or excited. "It's whatever is in your trash" was the response to pointing it out. While this was not true, they hadn't even begun dumping when the fluid started shooting out.

The fluid that came out was mostly oil, along with some really nasty residue. I looked inside of our dumpster, which did not have anything like this in it. The dumpster is new and handles mostly paper, so it's not nasty at all.

The trash company says they are going to come out and power wash the oil off the parking lot, but they haven't done it yet. This just puts the problem into the grass, so I'm not sure if it solves the problem, or just pushes it into the weeds.

Mold & Mildew Nightmare

We knew we had problems in the basement.

Andrea could smell it, even more so once she got pregnant, that dank disturbing basement scent.

We had two forms of mold and some mildew, as confirmed by a professional nastiness investigator, who also tried to scare the hell out of us about radon (his score there was 1&1).

The basement was covered with paneling and stucco almost 30 years ago, when my father had dreams of finishing the basement. The redecoration did not get completed, and the walls sat for years, condensing moisture. The perfect environment for growing mold.

So we stripped all the panelling off the walls and got rid of it. The smell is gone.

Slug Migrates for Winter

For some reason, this reminds me of a Far Side Cartoon. Something about "Look Mommy, the slugs are going south for the winter!"

Slugs are in the same family as snails, they seem to have evolved past snails, because some have internal or vestigial shells (around the part on their back called a mantle). They are made up mostly of water and need to secrete mucus in order to hold in their water and move over the terrain without injury. Sometimes they go over the windows on our sliding glass doors and leave little trails.

They have little feelers that look like antennae on their heads. These are called tentacles, and the upper pair are optical, while the lower pair is for smell/taste.

Slugs are hermaphrodites, meaning they are both male and female. They mate by curling in a ball around each other and lay eggs in the ground. Sometimes they crawl underground to get through the winter, but often they die in the winter. They also have problems in the heat of summer, if it's too dry and they have to find a dark, cool, moist place to seek refuge to get through the dry spell.

I was once with a friend when her cat walked in, working its jaw like a little franken-cat. His muzzle was covered with what we thought at first was foam (from drooling), but we soon discovered was a rubbery substance. The cat allowed me to peel the material out of his mouth, and somewhat off his face. However, it was like rubber cement, and I could not get it all out of the fur around his mouth. When the biggest plug came out of his mouth (I think it went into his throat and he was close to choking on it), the cat was back to normal and ran off to do more cat mischief.

I described the scene later to my brother, who is a veterinarian and he believes that the cat tried to eat a slug. The slug probably secreted some protective mucus when the cat started biting on it, and the mucus quickly congealed and became stuck on the cat's snout and in his mouth.

That's a hell of a defense mechanism.

This is what our new roof looks like from above.

We used to have wood shingles and the cats just loved to climb on them. Of course, cats love old wood to sharpen their claws on, so they loved to rip away at the old wood shingles.

I don't know how they feel about asphalt shingles.

Hedge Apple Mutant

Here's an interesting genetic mutation found in the yard. A three way siamese twin hedge apple. I'm going to dress up as this for Halloween.

Autumn Showcase

This display is outside of the Parks and Recreation office near the dam of Lake Jacomo. I love the color and the swaying fountain grass.

Lake Jacomo Picnic

This is what a picnic on a bright warm October day at Lake Jacomo looks like.

About 1 minute after the picture was taken, the dog chased the geese into the lake, and would have gone in after them, if we had let her.

Little Square Bales

I love the (now) old-fashioned little square hay bales. They used to be the only kind you saw, but now, there are those huge round bales that are the standard. You have to have some people still baling the hay with the old style, because you can't decorate for Halloween or have a hay rack ride on a big round bale.

The Passing Storm

I love the contrast of fall colors to the sky after an autumn thunderstorm passes through.

Back to Nature

Sometimes the slow return to nature is a very pretty thing.

This is from the long empty house next door.

Juniper Berries

I don't remember ever seeing so many of those pretty blue/violet berries on juniper bushes before. Some signals in the environment told the bushes to reproduce like mad.

Half Autumn

Here is the intersection just down the street. If you stand on the road that the car is turning onto, just past the right side of the frame, and shoot back toward the direction where this picture was taken from, you get the pond that I put on the cover of the blog. Each time the season changes, I put a different picture on the blog.

The house on the corner was for sale for 2 or 3 years. When someone finally did buy it, they immediately hired a tree crew to come in. Not only is this house memorable because it's right where I turn every morning when I leave work, but it also has these two huge sugar maples that usually turn bright orange each year. These trees are the prettiest trees in the area. The family across the street with the pond planted some kind of oak that turns deep red, so those trees are competing.

This year, only half of the trees are changing. The rest still look pretty green and summery. I hope we don't have our first freeze before they get a chance to change and make this a really colorful fall.

Ghost Mike

The camera was open for something like 12 seconds for this picture. I set the camera on a tripod, set the timer for 10 seconds, and ran in front of the camera to pose. I meant to hold perfectly still to put myself in the picture, but I only waited part of the time and then moved around to the back of the camera. That's why you can see through my shoulder. It's a 10 second shot of me and a 2 second shot of the door behind me, which is bright enough to overpower me.

Or I'm a ghost. It is getting close to Halloween.

Autumn Entryway

We like to put out some mums and pumpkins in the fall. It's nice to have some Halloweeny colors around the front of the house.

I took this picture on the night setting of my camera. It was very dark, so I did not see these details and colors when I took the picture. I put it on a tripod and it stayed open for 12 seconds. This means that everything had to stay perfectly still while the lens was open. The cat must have been very relaxed.

Schweizer's Orchard

We always go to an apple orchard each fall. When we were growing up in Lee's Summit, there was the Stephenson's Apple Orchard right here close. When I was around 6 or so, I got to drive a car for the first time in the orchard (I'm pretty sure it was just the steering part of the driving).

They sold the orchard off to developers and put something that is, I'm sure, more useful than a silly orchard. Like another faceless strip mall.

For the last couple of years we've been driving up to Weston Missouri, going to Vaughn Orchard. Last year was a horrible year for apples because there was a really late freeze and there was almost no apples.

This year we went to St. Joseph to Schweizer's Orchard, which Andrea found online, I think. This place was beautiful, with tons of pumpkins and mums for sale, and a really nice store. Besides apples and peaches, they had pumpkins (some really big ones) and lots of other vegetables.

Andrea says if we win the lottery that we will buy an apple orchard. It's a good plan.

Orb Weaver Summer

I like spiders. This is almost certainly linked to my early childhood experience of being shown first hand how they eat. My father used to put captured grasshoppers and other bugs in the web of a gardener spider in our yard. We got to watch the capture, the bite to stun the prey, the wrapping up of the prize, and the slow feeding on the hapless victim.

Spiders are our friends. We spray tons of insecticide, buy fly paper and bug zappers, hire exterminators, and use copious amounts of insect repellent. Here's a creature that will gladly dispose of all the nuisance insects for free.

Watching web construction is another fascinating pasttime. The patient task of spiralling around and around in ever tightening circles to complete the pattern is something to watch.

Scientist have noted that, "pound for pound" spider silk is stronger than steel. Many have sought to copy the procedure that the spider uses to make webbing. National Geographic had an excellent article on spiders some time back, complete with an awesome illustration of the web silk glands. These glands are in a cluster and the spider can make a variety of silk, from fine to thick, non-sticky to sticky. I knew there was variety because when they wrap prey it comes out in a net rather than a single strand. They make parachutes, fine jump lines, and egg casings all from the same material.

This summer has been thick with what we always called orb weaver spiders. In researching for this blog, I found the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araneidae which seems to indicate that Orb Weaver is a family of spiders, all the ones with elaborate webs. There is a picture of the species Eriophora transmarina on this page, which is similar in shape to the spider I've always thought of as the Orb Weaver, but it's lighter in color and lacks the two white spots of my local friends. The coolest thing about this spider is that it manages to place webs in really improbably places, like out in the open between trees, where you realize that the web spans 20 or 30 feet across.

The attached picture is too blurry to be satisfactory, but I took dozens of photos on two different occasions of the spider and not one came out in focus. I'll have to work on that. I'd like to identify the species, now that I see that there are hundreds of spiders in the family.

I listen to a podcast called "NPR: Driveway Moments Podcast". The 9/5/08 episode was about Charlotte's Web. I vaguely remember details from the book, having read it when I was very young. Everyone who has read it remembers the broad outline, the spider saves the pig by weaving words in the web over it's sty. E.B. White read the audiobook version of the book and had to redo the part where Charlotte dies several times because it made him cry each time he read it. The producer said it took him 17 takes to read that part. He remarked afterwards "It's ridiculous. A grown man, reading a book that he wrote, and being unable to read it aloud because of tears." They say that children take the death of Charlotte better than children for some reason.

Wouldn't it be a nicer world if we felt just a little more that way about the death of any of our animal friends?

First Maple of Fall

This tree is down the street and is always one of the prettiest fall colored trees in the area. It has a sister a bit to the left of it, which usually changes at the same time.

For some reason, this is the first and only tree to turn this year. It stands by itself with all the trees around it staying green. The house was purchased recently, after being on the market for a few years, and the new owner hired a large crew to come in an remove several trees and trim back the rest. I'm not sure if the recent trimming had anything to do with shocking the maple into changing early.

This house is right across the street from the pond that I always use as the title shot on the blog. I stop next to the house, just to the right of the tree in the picture and shoot across the pond at various times in the season.

Hint of Fall at Sailboat Cove

This is what the Sailboat Cove looks like in early October with the trees just starting to change. I wonder if they are still going to take the sailboats out on the lake, and when they are going to haul them all out of the lake and store them for the winter?

Butterflies and Black Eyed Susans

I noticed a lot of these yellow butterflies in the last few weeks. They are the same color as the black eyed susans they like to hang out on.

Coincidence? I think not.

Adolescent Turkeys

We have several growing flocks of adolescent turkeys this year.

While the neighbors up and down the street have been feeding the turkeys with cracked corn, there has been very little hunting or predator pressure on turkeys. This has caused a turkey population explosion, and no one is complaining.

There are two things I've noticed about turkeys.

1. They never get hit by cars. You'll see possums, turtles, raccoons, and snakes flattened on the road (think Far Side with the Vultures with the spatulas). My theory is that turkeys are both smarter and more versatile than other animals. You see them walking and strutting around so much that you almost forget that they can fly. They are also more alert and wary than most animals, so I think that they watch carefully, don't cross the street unless it's clear, and move fast if they get into trouble.

2. You almost never see really small turkeys. They are about half grown before you see them strutting around in the yard in the open without hiding. I think their mothers are overcautious when the turkeys are tiny and defenseless.

So here's evidence that the turkey does eventually emerge from their protective custody and get a turkey life out there.

Wedding Bouquet

What do you do with your wedding bouquet?

We saved ours until it was completely falling apart, and now it resides outside next to our potted vinca.

I just can't bear to throw it away.

I saw a really cool display of a wedding bouquet that was more than 2 years old. It was in a glass vase on a shelf with a mini spotlight shining on it.

I might do something wicccan like putting it into a nice woodland setting. We'll see.

Primeval for Oreos

What do Oreo Cookies have to do with a blog called Animal Tales?

It's because I'm an animal when it comes to cookies.

OK, it's a pretty weak premise, but it's my blog and I get to write whatever I want in it, don't I?

Some people (other than me) may have noticed that Oreo likes to mix it up a bit. They like to make different cookie shapes from time to time, special edition production runs. Sometimes they vary the flavor, too.

Wikipedia actually has a whole section on varieties of Oreos. [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo#Variations_and_adaptations] I thought I had seen them shaped like different things, but that is probably Ritz Crackers I'm thinking of.

I remember the Halloween Oreos, and the White Fudge covered Oreos, and I've also had the Golden Oreos, with the vanilla cookie & white cream (highly recommended). My wife thinks you should only eat Double Stuf Oreos, but I like the normal ones if they are dipped in milk.

However, the point of my story is the incredible limited edition Banana Split Creme Oreos. These are really good. I can't imagine what would happen if an open bag of these was put in a room full of chimpanzees. It's be the primate equivalent of a birthday party for a 3 year old and all his friends.

In doing a search for this story, I also see rumors about a Strawberry Milkshake Oreo that was only released in Canada. This may be a myth, as Wikipedia seems to know nothing about it. It might be similar to a sighting of a Yeti.

Double Rainbow

I was in the car with my brother's family last month, driving back from my aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary in Wichita. Some storms had just blown through and were retreating to the east while the sun was setting to the west behind us. Driving up I-35, we had a perfect view of a large, bright double rainbow.

The clouds were moving around, so at times it was just a single rainbow, and sometimes clouds blocked parts of the arc, but there were times when the primary or secondary rainbow were visible all the way from one side to the other.

This was one of the biggest rainbows I've ever seen, the sun was right on the horizon. The sun makes rainbows circular, but they get cut off by the horizon. The rainbow is also always directly opposite the direction of the sun.

Why is there a rainbow? The sun is going into rain drops and bouncing off the back of the drop and acting as a prism. A prism splits white light into all the different colors they contain. This does not explain to me why the rainbow is in an arc. A double rainbow is when light bounces off the inside back side of the raindrop, then reflects off the inside front side of the drop before reflecting one more time.

The colors in the rainbow always go in the same order. You remember it by the word ROYGBIV (it's supposed to sound like a guy's name Roy G. Biv). That's Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo and Violet. Check it out next time you see a rainbow.

But don't waste your time looking for the pot of gold. By definition, you'll never reach the end of the rainbow.

Buffalo Tongue

I go to the Fleming Park Hooved Animal Enclosure from time to time. It's a good place to go and get up close to Buffalos and Elk. I like to stick the carrots through the chain link fence and watch them magically disappear.

This is a slightly blurry, and therefore surreal picture of a buffalo tongue, right before I pop a carrot in there. It's sort of like a 1500 pound reverse pez dispenser. Look at that big wet nose, too.

My brother, a vet, told me that they do not have upper and lower teeth (just one or the other, probably just lowers), so they can't actually bite you. You can stick your finger in the mouth and let them try to swallow it. It sounds like fun, doesn't it?

I haven't tried it yet.

Early Fall

This tree is showing signs of changing, at least a month before it normally would. The picture was taken 8/22/08, still in summer.

I noticed some sumac changing bright red before this [see Fall in July post from September 6, 2008], but that could have been caused by some herbicide or something. This tree changing, plus a few other random changes makes a trend.

This summer was one of the lushest or wettest I can remember. It wasn't like the flood summers of 1993 or 1995, when the Missouri and Mississippi were flooding over dikes and the pond filled up overnight (only to empty within 2 weeks) [see Full Pond post May 19, 2008]. It never rained to the point of flooding here (Iowa had historic floods in late June early July), but it never really stopped raining. If we had something like weather control, where we could make it rain when we wanted, you would set the rain to come down in about an inch or so a week, and it did that most of the summer. While the grass never got out of control, because the yard was never so soggy that a lawn tractor left ruts, it also never dried out enough for anything to go dormant in the middle of the summer.

One of my theories about why the fall colors came so early is that the plants never got a dormancy rest and were able to produce enough sap & nutrients all summer to fill up the root system for the winter. Mission accomplished, close up shop and shut down early?

My other theory is that the last couple of years early fall frosts and late spring frosts have reset the plant's crops and maybe they are being paranoid. I know that the leaves signal to the plant when to flower, maybe there is something signalling when turn colors. I noticed that some of the trees have just one limb that changes.

One story I heard about spring was that if it was too dry the trees would be too stressed and the colors would not be very brilliant. Usually, everyone hopes that there will not be an early frost right when the colors are bright and autumny, because they turn dull, die, and drop off right after that. I also noticed that this year, with a warm, wet fall, and early changing trees, that the colors are not as brilliant as usual. Everything has this dull brown tint coming over it rather than bright oranges and scarlets that the maples and fire bushes normally have. The vines that usually turn the deepest shades of red and tend to cover the trunks of large trees are very prominent right now.

I don't know what's causing it, but it is a very odd fall.

Missoula

We went through Missoula on the way back, which was out of the way, but someplace we were very curious about.

The forest fires to the south were bringing a big cloud of very dark smoke up from the south west, but it was clear overhead and to the north east. The sun looked just like it does in this picture (low in the sky and close to the horizon) at 3 hours before the sunset. This picture was taken 2 hours later, closer to the Idaho border.

We talked to a guy in Missoula that said he was 44 and had grown up there and lived there all his life. When asked if the temperature was a record, he said that last summer was a record, reaching around 110° for a week, but this was the hottest it had gotten that summer. He said that the fires had become a fact of life, and that the smoke was so bad sometimes that you couldn't exert yourself outside because it was too thick. He mentioned that it used to get very cold for a long time in the winter, with deep snow, but nowadays, it sometimes was 60° and balmy in the middle of the winter. He said they liked to go down and hang out in the river to cool out.

The town had a cool college town vibe and was pretty, but the bluffs around town had no trees on them and were golden and dormant from lack of rain.

It probably falls under the "good place to visit" category.

Park Cafe

One major complaint about Glacier National Park: the food was horrible.

On our last day, still held hostage to the fact that there was nothing anywhere near, trapped in the town of Saint Mary at lunch time (where the local gas station was busily gouging customers at $4.60 per gallon for gas), we tried something else.

The Park Cafe looked cool, with all the wildflowers around it. It was staffed with cool people, all women with a neo-60's post-hippie hippie girl groove. It had great pie. But the meal was only average, which made it gourmet in comparison with anything else within a two hours drive.

Welcome to Canada

That flagpole behind Andrea does have a Canadian flag on it. Andrea had never been in Canada before, so we took an extra half hour to go pass through the customs stop and cross the border. We almost purchased some fine china with Queen Elizabeth on it, but we were barely able to resist it.

The area along Highway 89 north of Babb Montana up to the Canadian border was a rolling plain without irrigation, with tons of fields that had been cut and bailed for the cattle. It was golden colored, showing that there had not been much rain. Completely different from the ecosystem in Glacier Park.

Saint Mary Falls

This was supposed to be the last hike on our last day. It was still so hot and we were too tired to do any long hikes. We had heard that this little falls was beautiful and worth the "short" walk back, but it was enough for us to call it quits for the day. The final Glacier Park event, and a good note to end on.

Continental Divide

This is another example of the kindness of strangers for getting a picture. This great big gentle bear of a man offered to take our picture at Logan Pass.