Big Sky Country

Whenever we break camp and head on down the road, each of us goes through a series of standard tasks. Nancy makes sure that everything inside is stowed away safely and ready for travel. I lower the DirecTV satellite, retract the standard TV antenna, raise the leveling jacks, and bring in the slideouts. I disconnect the shore power and the water supply, then I connect the sewer hose and empty the holding tanks. Then, if the tow vehicle is detached, we hook that up again.

On Saturday morning we were preparing to leave Whitefish. As always, I hooked up the hose from our holding tanks to the ground-level sewer hookup at our campsite and pulled the handle to flush out the "black tank" containing toilet residue. But the procedure took an unusual turn. I looked over and there was a fountain of brown at the end of the hose. There is a plastic connector that screws into the sewer hookup, and the hose had come loose from that connector, dumping the mess onto the ground and fouling our site before I could shut it down. Things weren't smelling too fresh.

As a foursquare, take-full-responsibility person, I immediately ran into the motorhome, told Nancy the horrifying truth, and whispered to her, "Let's get out of here before the trailer park manager catches us." We hit the road in record time.

RV life is a series of learning experiences. Being a guy, I usually blame equipment failure when something goes wrong. But I can see that failing to check sewer hose connections may have played some small part in this episode. I'll avoid that mistake in the future.

Our next stop was Butte, Montana. The drive from Whitefish along State Highway 83 through several national forests is absolutely stunning and highly recommended. It led eventually to a very different landscape - one that had us saying, yes, this is big sky country.

I'd sometimes wondered what that term meant. Every place has the same amount of sky, right? But on the way to Butte, the forests disappeared. Impressive mountain ranges were visible in the distance on all sides. Although there were rolling hills, the overall surface was relatively flat, and there were no tall trees to obstruct the view. So there was a panorama from side to side of around 170 degrees, And the clouds were magnificent - cumulus along the edges and fluffy flying saucer clouds overhead.

In Butte we parked overnight for the first time at a Walmart Superstore. Unless there are local restrictions prohibiting it, Walmart allows recreational vehicles to park for free on the periphery of their parking lots, in hopes that the travelers will buy their necessities at their stores.

Thinking that Walmart was just too upmarket, Nancy went shopping for supplies at the adjacent Dollar Store. She ran into a former hospice nurse whose husband had been transferred from San Diego to Redlands to Butte. She hated living there, saying that the people were very unsophisticated and uninterested in anything outside their routine existence. Of course that's only one woman's experience.  But it doesn't sound good.  And I suspect we'll find a lot of that in the small towns and small cities across America. 

The next morning we headed for Yellowstone Park.