8/14/2018

We had our Dish system serviced this morning to correct some issues with the initial installation at the dealer. All is good now.  After that, we went to Kalispell. I just could not believe how much it has grown since I traveled there 20+ years ago. There are a lot of new commercial buildings/businesses. I can’t figure out how a town of roughly 23K people can support the number of big stores including a Cabelas, Costco, REI, Target, Walmart, Bed Bath and Beyond, big car dealerships, etc, etc. They must be pulling customers from a pretty large radius around the city. We also saw a lot of big new housing areas.

We came back to the RV for a couple hours and then headed to Whitefish to visit the weekly farmers market. Great live music, crafts , food trucks and, of course, lots of fresh vegetables. We picked up some fresh, locally grown cherries, tomatoes, green beans and a melon. Afterwards, we went back to a pub we visited a few days ago for a beer and another plate of the best pork nachos either of us has ever had. We’ll miss Whitefish….it’s a fairly small city with a very cool downtown.

The fires around the area have really been devastating, The West Glacier Park housing for summer employees was burned down along with some historic buildings and other structures. The west entrance to Glacier has been closed, and campgrounds and park lodges in West Glacier have all been evacuated. The local Dish technician that worked on our RV has lived here all of his life and he said he has never seen the fires and smoke this bad. You really can barely see the mountains that surround Whitefish and Columbia Falls. One of the pics below shows just how smokey the air is. We even saw people wearing those filters over their mouth and nose. Frankly, I don’t think it was THAT bad.

Normally, the mountains in the background of the first pic would be very visible

We head to Eagle Nest RV Resort on Flathead Lake in Polson, MT, in the morning……