Montana Trip - Day 1 - Travel

Everyday this week I will be documenting the events of the previous week in which my brother Patrick and I spent at Glacier National Park with my Dad. We'll take it day-by-day as it happened, just 7 days after the fact.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Today is our day to head to Montana. It couldn't have come at a better time. After a tough loss to our hated rivals, Patrick, Dad, and I were not feeling to great about our Bears. Dad talked to both of us on the phone early in the day to get our gripes out, and Patrick and I talked briefly about it at the Indy airport. After that, it was pretty much forgotten. Normally I would stew over a loss to the Packers all week, especially a loss like that, where we played bad, still had a chance to win it at the end, and then blew it on a bad play. I've seen it too many times. A week in Montana hiking and backpacking totally removed it from my mind. I would suffer in other ways this week, but we'll get to that as it comes.

Our flight pattern this year included stops at Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and finally Kalispell. I don't know if you count only being in the airport as "visiting" a certain place. If you do, then that was my first time "visiting" Utah. It was rainy and cold. I know because we actually had to walk outside to get on the small jet that would be taking us to Montana. We left Indianapolis at 12:39 p.m. ET and finally arrived in Kalispell, MT at 6:46 p.m. MT. The extra flight leg made for a long day, and Patrick and I were both ready to be off airplanes for awhile.

Minneapolis, MN airport. Might as well be a mall. Vikings and Favre both make me sick. Photo by Patrick Chinn taken with my iPhone.

Salt Lake City, UT from the airport terminal. Taken with iPhone.

After Dad picked us up at the airport, we followed the usual routine of getting dinner and stopping for groceries for the week. We got the usual fare - ham, cheese, tortillas, apples, bananas, cowboy cookies, and essential beverages of Mt. Dew, Vitamin Water, and Mike's Hard Lemonade.

 The Montana sunset... from the grocery store parking lot. Taken with iPhone.

Once we got to Dad's we readied the backpacks for mine and Patrick's first ever backpacking trip. We didn't have a long one plan, just one night, but there was a lot of hiking in there. We called it a night about midnight mountain time.