We were tired from the long day of driving and sitting at the RV dump station for an hour (ha), so we slept till about 8am and got on the road by 9:30 or so. We had a general idea of where we wanted to stay (Whitefish/Kalispell/West Glacier area) but of course had no specifics of where we'd end up. We wanted to find some camping in the Flathead National Forest, but for some reason, that is tougher than you'd think.
We drove towards Missoula and stopped at a Pilot to get gas and check tire pressure on the trailer tires. (Side note: While at Sunny Gulch, we rotated the tires on the trailer since the front axle set was getting chewed up pretty bad and we knew we'd have to keep an eye on them.) Air pressure was good all around, but the one tire was totally shot and starting to come apart. No good. We drove over to the DOT certified scale area that was temporarily closed, dropped the trailer, and proceeded to change the tire.
Chris, the mechanic at the Pilot, informed us that there was a tire place up the road that would probably have trailer tires. We thanked him for the info. and off we went.
The guys at the shop were great.
They didn't have any trailer tires in stock, but the owner or manager (not sure really) had just put new tires on his travel trailer and hadn't yet moved it. He volunteered to take the tire from his rig and sell it to us. He said he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon and he would just order a replacement for his own trailer. Sweet! At this point, we could have been taken advantage of big time. We were not. These guys were great and only charged us $75 for the tire and the swap. Bill had heard some horror stories about RVers being taken by greedy mechanics and tire shops so we were both expecting the worst. Thank you, God.
Within 15 minutes we were on our way.
We saw some more interesting sites...
...and "wherever" ended up being Mountain View RV Park in Hungry Horse, MT. It's 9 miles from the West Glacier park entrance and is pretty nice for an RV park.
BTW - RV parks are generally hideous and I literally would rather camp in a WalMart parking lot than go to one of these places. At least at WalMart I have some privacy. These RV parks generally squish you in so tight that you can tell what your neighbor had for dinner...hours after they've eaten. Yuck.
This one isn't so bad...and our site is surrounded by Huckleberry bushes. YUM!
We'll be here for 3 nights - can't be without a place to stay over the weekend or we really will be camping out in the WalMart parking lot. Since it's an RV park, you pay for a lot of stuff that we don't use so it's more expensive than we're used to paying and certainly more expensive than I have budgeted. Oh well. At least it's convenient to the park.
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