Day 3: Glacier's Going-to-the-Sun Road

(Days 1 and 2 are here. They both involved waking up before 6 a.m.)

On Day 3 we finally got to sleep in! This is a vacation after all and at nearly 9 a.m. I found myself sitting on the back deck of our little rental cabin, the only one awake, wearing long sleeves, drinking my tea, and flipping through pictures from the day before. We ate breakfast at home, packed lunches, and headed out to drive the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road across Glacier National Park.

As mentioned in previous posts, you need a vehicle registration pass to enter the park at west entrance and drive the road from west to eat. We didn't have one (they get claimed QUICK, like within a few seconds, exactly 180 days out), so we drove the opposite direction, from east to west, entering the park at the St. Mary's entrance. While it was yet another long drive over to get to the east side of the park (about 90 minutes), it meant we ended our journey at the relatively more populated west side where we could play at Lake McDonald again, get a snack or drink, and be only 20 minutes from home. It worked out great, particularly because of the aquatic turn our journey ended up taking.

A marvel of 1920’s engineering, the 50-mile GTTS road spans the whole of Glacier National Park with soaring views, shrinking glaciers, waterfalls everywhere, beautiful hikes along every mile. We listened to our GuideAlong app for its history and stories and fun facts and had to pull over to explore a tunnel with windows built into it.

After another hour or so of driving, with gorgeous views, cool air, no cell service, interesting GuideAlong stories, and a few stops at lookout points, we saw some beautiful water that looked deep enough to swim in. Jumping off rocks is Landon's favorite thing in the entire world (a love that is shared by the rest of the family), so we had to pull over. We changed into suits in the car and Landon was the first one out to scramble barefoot down a path, across rocks, and fling himself off a boulder into the coldest water I’ve ever felt in my life.

It was also some of the most beautiful and most clear water ever, but omg was it freezing.

In the words of Landon, "Mom it's so cold that I kind of felt like I couldn't breathe, but then I could again." Also, "I can't put my head underwater because it feels like my eyeballs will explode." I quite literally put a single toe in and NOPE. That rock wasn't high enough to make the jump cool enough to be worth that kind of temperature shock.

It did not deter James and the kids in the least though and I love that for them. I basked on the rocks like a lizard in my bikini and took pictures of my family.

I truly love how Claire, who battles fears about so many things, will throw herself off a tall boulder into freezing water without hesitation.

After a stop at Lake McDonald for ice cream (for the kids) and a huckleberry margarita (for me), our waiter told us about a “really tall” bridge you can jump off, so of course we headed there next.

Belton Bridge is 40 feet above FREEZING water and yes both boys immediately jumped off:

Now that we were at the end of our day, I decided I didn't mind getting wet. Also, this bridge was really high and the cold plunge felt worth the thrill, so I asked Claire if she wanted to jump with me and she did!

It was so cold when I hit the water that I quite literally couldn’t breathe but I DID IT and it’s important to show your teenagers that you can.

I did not expect my swimsuit to be quite so heavily featured in our National Park hiking trip. I threw it up in the suitcase thinking maybe we'd do a hot spring or something, but no, my little Target bikini got flung into multiple bodies of water and wasn't quite up to the task. It did its best though.

After we finally left the bridge, many jumps later, we drove the 20 minutes home to make tacos back at the cabin, play off the back deck, and sleep. Day 4 would be our long drive to Yellowstone, and we would be leaving Glacier with big smiles and happy, grateful hearts.

Days 1-2: Glacier National Park!

I already wrote our high-level overview of the trip and now we'll dive back into each stop!

Day 1: Travel from Dallas to Montana

We woke up early on Tuesday to catch the one direct flight from Dallas to Kalispell, MT out of DFW (and drop our car in the uncovered far remote parking and take a 20 minute bus ride to our terminal, something that would come back to bite us in the end for sure). The flight was easy and uneventful and we landed in Montana, 30 minutes from Glacier National Park, marveling at what that drive from Dallas would have looked like (long, mostly). We picked up our rental minivan and headed over to West Glacier, stopping for groceries on the way and buying our Bear Spray and a little cooler bag to keep the cold food in.

Our cabin was in Essex, which is past the West Glacier entrance and on your way over to the East side. You need a vehicle registration pass to drive past the Apgar Village and Visitor's Center, but you can explore the village and that west shore of beautiful Lake McDonald without one.

Landon immediately took off his shoes and waded into the water. I didn't even see him do it- I was admiring the view and taking a picture and then Landon's head crossed over into my iPhone frame.

The lake is beautiful, the colored rocks are more vibrant than they appear in the pictures, and we enjoyed just hanging out on the water's edge, walking through the few little shops in the village, and trying our first huckleberry ice cream.

After 3 pm you can drive past the Visitor's Center without a pass so we drove along Lake McDonald for a little ways, listening to our GuideAlong and learning about the park (there is NO cell service, none, download everything before you leave home). We stopped at the east end of Lake McDonald, explored Lake McDonald lodge, and then drove back out to our cabin, enjoying our newly acquired Huckleberry Jellybeans along the way. (Note: I will now try anything with huckleberry in it; everything was amazing and we should all have more huckleberries in our life.)

The cabin was cozy and comfortable- 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom (note to my future self: we really need 2 if possible). It was warm- they didn't have a/c, which isn't unusual up there, but it was a 90-degree day that luckily turned into a 55-degree night. We made pasta, garlic bread, and salad for dinner, prepped our hiking backpacks and picnic lunches, and tucked ourselves in bed, knowing we had another big early day in the morning.

Day 2: Grinnell Glacier Hike

Our alarms went off at 5:30 to begin our journey to the Many Glacier entrance in East Glacier! There are many great blog posts about how to get around Glacier, what hikes to do, etc., but know that most of the hikes are long so unless you have more days than we did, you'll need to narrow it down. I settled on Grinnell Glacier, purely from the pictures, and I have no regrets.

(I took that picture with my phone; it's hard to believe it's real and I was there.)

The hike is 11 miles, leaving from the Grinnell Glacier Trailhead by the Many Glacier hotel. You can carve 2 miles off the hike each direction by booking tickets with the Glacier Park Boat Company. The boat tickets also get you a vehicle registration pass to enter the Many Glacier portion of the park for that day, which is good, because those passes sold out way quicker than the boat reservations when I tried to get them.

The drive to the Many Glacier entrance is LONG, nearly 2 hours from where we started at our cabin, and the last part of the drive is slow-going and gravel, though the views are beautiful. It took a while to get into the park because of the line to check passes and registrations, so we ended up cutting it WAY closer to our 8:30 boat launch time than we meant to. James dropped me off at the Many Glacier hotel entrance and I raced to the ticket office to pick up our passes just as they were releasing any not-yet-claimed to the waitlist, something they do EXACTLY 10 minutes before the boat leaves. Then I got to stand by the boat dock panicking as my husband and children did not immediately appear to board the boat. There is no cell service, so I kept debating going to find them in the parking lot or hotel lobby or wherever they were v. waiting in a position where I could yell at them from a distance to hurry up and the captain might not leave without us. Life before cell phones is wild.

They finally made it, maybe 30 seconds before 8:30, and we RAN onto the boat just before it pushed off.

The boat ride was beautiful. We all got to breathe a little. The boat captain told great stories. We traveled across Swiftcurrent Lake, walked a short ways, and then boated across Lake Josephine. At the drop-off you can choose to ride the boat back (many people did this), hang out for a bit to catch the next boat back, or begin the now-7 mile out-and-back hike to Grinnell Glacier. If you don't get a boat ride you can just walk along the lake. It's an easy, flat path, but long and I'm glad we got to skip it. Plus the views from the boats were beautiful.

Once at the far end of Lake Josephine, we began our hike.

Flat at first, it immediately began to climb a total of 1,750 vertical feet over 3.5 miles.

It was hard. It was spectacular. It was busier than I expected but not crowded.

We saw wildlife: a deer, a herd of big horned sheep, a fluffy marmot, a pure white mountain goat, and at the very end: a mama and baby Moose!

We ate a lot of snacks. We drank a lot of our water. It was a lot of climbing.

But the views- it felt like I took a picture every 5 minutes but not one of them captured the beauty of our hike and I deleted nearly all of them on returning.

The glacial lakes are SO blur, the mountain is so green, the waterfalls are plentiful and everywhere... we alternated feeling like we were in Colorado, the Pacific Northwest, and the Swiss Alps, but it was all Montana. This picture reminded me of the end of Sound of Music when they're hiking over the Alps to Switzerland.

Once you get to the end of the trail, you can can stop at a little rest area with some log benches and a view of the lake or continue on to the glacier itself.

We continued on of course, our sweaty clothes turing frigid in the suddenly icy wind.

But we made it!

We ate our packed lunches, Landon claimed he was going to swim but settled for his feet getting wet, and then we fast-hiked back to make the list for the 1:30 boat back.

We did (barely! the next boat wasn't for another 2 hours so if we hadn't made the cut we probably would have just walked along the lakes back). While we waited for the boat, James changed into his swimsuit and dove into the (freezing!) lake for a swim, to the shock and applause of our fellow hikers/boat riders.

This is also when the mama moose and baby appeared across the lake, which was a delight.

We boated back across both lakes and then, on our drive back from the Many Glacier entrance to our cabin, we saw a mama bear and THREE baby bears foraging for berries!! We stopped and watched from our car on the side of the road, laughing at the curious bear cubs who kept popping their little fuzzy faces up to look around, before continuing our long drive home to the cabin.

Two hours later we climbed out of the car with shaky legs, rested a bit, and drove into town to eat some pizza for dinner. I think we were all asleep within 30 minutes of getting back to the cabin. What a great day.

Rough Reentry, Sudden Surgery, and Lost Comments

I know I've written about this a few dozen times at least, but I LOVE vacations. I love traveling with the kids and James, love being somewhere new, love spending time together... I may love my regular life (and I do!), but I love checking out of all its responsibilities and being with my family in a new place even more. James and I have always been 100% together on our priority to go on adventures with our kids, even when they were young and we had very little money and we just drove to neighboring states and stayed in state park cabins and spent less than $500 per trip. Making memories with our core crew was important to us and vacations were our favorite way to do it. Plus, we had kids really young and we weren't going to give up on our 20's and 30's because of it.

I saw this meme a friend posted and it perfectly captured what I would try to explain to others when we traveled so much with our young pack 10+ years ago.

I think about it often. There's much the kids don't remember, particularly Cora, but I do and I treasure the memories from our trips in a way that is different from my also-fond memories of our day-to-day life at various stages. For me there's something brighter about memories made on vacation; maybe it's because I've also always worked full time, but vacation memories just stand out bolder in my mind, like they're easier to grab onto when we make them, maybe because they allow us to be together without the distractions and tasks of regular life.

Anyway, the point is that I really love vacations and I already have a countdown until our next one in December (133 days). BUT ALSO, the reentry from vacations is the freaking worst and I get why people would think they'd rather just not go. Often this is because I like to get sick as soon as we enter the airspace over DFW, but this time, I am the only one not making our life complicated. (Cora and Milo are also relatively unproblematic.)

We got back from Idaho Falls on Wednesday evening. Despite our increased vacation budget, I am still too cheap for onsite airport parking, so we waited in the 110 degree heat for the remote parking bus to take us to our car-- our navy blue exterior, black leather car that had been baking for 9 days in the sun because I am also too cheap for covered parking. The car was predictably hellishly hot inside, but less predictably, it also wouldn't start. So we stood on the asphalt parking lot, absolutely baking, while waiting for an extra shuttle bus to come by and jump us. That worked (thank you bus!) and we drove home with plans to force ourselves to stop at the grocery store because vacation mode was over and meals at home were back on the menu. We pulled up to the store, turned off the car, and then found out it wasn't a one-time drained battery, it was a dead battery and the car wouldn't turn back on again. I got groceries while James made awkward eye-contact with people in the parking lot to get someone to jump us again. It was SO HOT I hated making anyone stay outside a minute longer than necessary, but he found a volunteer quickly (thank you kind sir!). We got home about 8 pm, unpacked, started wash, ate dinner, and went to bed. Thursday morning was going to be busy and now that we were down 1 car and up 1 car appointment, it was going to be more so. Also, Landon mentioned off-hand that his back left tooth hurt maybe like a lot?

So at 9 am Thursday morning, we jumped James's car with Landon's, James headed out to NTB, Landon headed to his high school orientation, I dropped Claire off at the orthodontist to get her braces off on my way to work, and Cora was left at home because #thirdbaby. I had back-to-back (to-back-to-back) calls, James got a new battery, Landon called the dentist while waiting in line for his junior year schedule, they referred him to a periodontist, and he made an appointment for 11 am. Meanwhile, James picked up Claire to take her straight to her own high school orientation while I called the periodontist to explain that we could not attend Landon's appointment with him and what could I sign and PDF over to them so they can please treat him. James picked Claire up from her orientation (she was nervous; it went great!), I left work early to pick up Maggie from the boarding doggie summer camp she attended and bring her home. While on the way, the periodontist called to tell me Landon's wisdom tooth was impacted and causing severe swelling and they could take all of them out tomorrow (now today) at 10:45. James was taking Claire back to school for her student/parent meet-the-teachers event and I took Cora to HER meet-the-teacher night at her school. We made dinner at 8 pm and informed Landon he was having surgery in the morning because apparently he missed that detail from the doctor who I'm 100% certain explained it to him. He insisted he did not need surgery and could just chew on his right side forever.

(James just called: Landon is out of surgery and doing great. I could hear Landon in the background saying, "Tell Mom I was a champion." He wants to go to swim practice this afternoon. James countered with Smoothie King, a nap, and two cats. I believe he won.)

Also! We had appointments at 9 am this morning to get all the kids passports renewed because we HAVE to do it in the summer because the passport office basically runs on the school schedule and getting 3 kids out of 3 schools is impossible. Luckily, Landon's impromptu oral surgery could be worked around that task, and my 10 am call could proceed as scheduled when it was done.

And now everything is done! I made sure everyone got their uniforms, backpacks, books, and school shoes all set before we left on our trip, so there is none of that to do thank god. And strangely we have absolutely nothing to do this weekend (except write the vacation report blog posts!).

Brace-free!

I'm at work, currently eating an Aloha bar at my desk for lunch, very glad that I leaned hard on my personal philosophy that you should work as absolutely little as you can on vacation- the return is going to suck regardless, so might as well unplug while you can. And I did! I opened my laptop exactly one time to respond to a client email that my team was already on top of, generally perused my Outlook app on my phone whenever we got back to the cabin to be sure nothing was on fire, and otherwise read silly books, drank sparkling rose, and slept a LOT whenever we weren't hiking or adventuring somewhere. It was glorious.

Today's work 'fit

So! We've been back for less than 48 hours and it's been quite a ride. Maggie is so tired from camp that we keep forgetting she's home; even snoring is too much effort for her as she recharges in her doggie house charging station. The cats are delighted to have us back; Claire said Milo basically slept on her face all night Wednesday night and Moose keeps hanging out near us even though he usually only does that when we're being stationary. Cora is excited about school (ish) and we are excited about still having one kid in sweet, simple elementary school. Claire likes having smooth teeth again and is maybe kind of sort of ready and excited for her freshman year of high school. Landon is ready but not excited for junior year. James is glad to have a car that turns on when requested and I am glad that he and the kids can operate without me because I am making up for all the not-working I did while vacationing.

OH! ALSO! Last night while sitting on the couch not working I clicked on the "comments" tab of my ancient blogger account. I noticed there was a "spam" category and when I clicked on it I found well over 200 comments that were definitely NOT spam (amongst a couple thousand that absolutely were), including several comments OF MINE from my own damn blogger account in response to comments you all left and I feel terrible you didn't see them! And that I didn't see some of yours! They went all the way back to 2007, so I'm sure most will remain unseen, scattered throughout the archives of this blog, but particularly if you asked something in the last few posts, there's probably a response from me now. And my Snow Day AMA from last year now has some previously unpublished responses. I'm so sorry those were missing so long. Your comments are my favorite things after I sent these thoughts out into the black hole of the internet and I feel terrible I didn't see them when they were written and/or you didn't see my response!

According to this tab I never clicked on before, I have over 18,800 of them, so thank you! I promise to pay better attention from now on...

2024 National Park Trip: Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho!

Hello from beautiful Idaho!

Yes, this is Idaho!

We are on the last day of our fabulous summer adventure through three new (to us!) states and three National Parks. I thought I'd summarize our itinerary here and then have posts for each park. (I hope; we know how my plans usually go for post-vacation posting, particularly here where we fly back today, all 3 kids have school orientation events tomorrow, everyone has to renew their passports on Friday, I have one million work calls scheduled for those two days, and school begins ON MONDAY which feels sad and impossible and I usually love the first day of school, but with big kids, I like the summer even more.)

Anyway! Vacation! It's been wonderful. I started planning this trip about 9 months ago when we decided we wanted a domestic adventure trip for the summer. We're taking a big international trip for Christmas break this year, and we did Mexico/the beach for Spring Break, so we wanted our summer vacation to be low-key and continental-US based, to take us back to our hiking/National Park vacationing roots, and most of all to NOT be hot.

We didn't quite luck out on the temperature thing, since it's hit at least 90 every day we've been here, but the mornings and evenings are cool and it's certainly better than the 105 degree high that Dallas has today. Plus, the warmer temps have also meant the kids have been able to swim in every park and that has been a blast.

We keep a National Park map in our game room and put pushpins in the parks we've explored. You can tell from the map that we've lived in the DFW area for all of our exploring years and have always driven to our destinations. You can draw a circle out from our home base and see that the Grand Canyon to the west and Great Smoky Mountains to the east is as far as we were willing to drive (and that was FAR!).

Now that our vacation budget has increased a bit, we got to take our first flight to get to a new portion of the map. Glacier has long been on my list, and when I found out there were direct flights from Dallas to Kalispell, MT, and a good friend and partner of mine at the firm just finished her family's beautiful vacation home in Swan Valley, ID, I settled on the Glacier/Yellowstone/Grand Teton trio we've completed and it's been fantastic.

Our high-level itinerary:

Day 1: Fly to Kalispell, MT (Glacier Park International Airport)
- Pick up minivan (drop off in Idaho at end); 30 min drive to Glacier NP
- Stop at Apgar Visitor's Center, explore Lake McDonald
- Stay: VRBO cabin

Day 2: Glacier: Many Glacier entrance; Swiftcurrent/Lake Josephine boat tickets; hike to Grinnell Glacier

Day 3: Glacier: Going-to-the Sun Road drive, starting from St. Mary's entrance (East side)

Day 4: Drive from Glacier to Gardiner, MT (North entrance to Yellowstone)
- 7 hour drive
- Stay: VRBO cabin

Day 5: Yellowstone: Private Yellowstone Wild wildlife tour

Day 6: Yellowstone: Drive through Yellowstone, stop at geothermal features and geysers, continue through Grand Tetons on way to Swan Valley, ID
- 5 hour drive
- Stay: Friend's home (now listed on Airbnb and HIGHLY recommended!)

Day 7: Idaho: Swan Valley play day/Fall Creek Falls, dinner in Jackson Hole

Day 8: Grand Tetons: Phelps Lake hike

Day 9: Fly to Dallas from Idaho Falls Airport
- 1 hour drive to airport

Fun tips and packing notes, in absolutely no order: