T-Minus 8 Days

If you look carefully at the end of the last post you see a big square where there should be an apostrophe. That happened to every apostrophe and a few other punctuation marks the last time Scott uploaded a post that he created in Word. He’s chalking that up to a font issue and trying again. Also, problems with the site being sluggish and non responsive appear to have been a hardware glitch on their end and they seem to have fixed things. The site is working great for us. Please let us know if you have problems.

We’re leaving a week from tomorrow. We’re into “last minute” mode here at the Herrfield-Redlings. This evening we downloaded the handy dandy list of NPR stations. And figured out what to do with our car while we’re away (we’re going with Galaxy Self Park, which appears to be the cheapest option outside of taking a taxi).

We need to purchase a few more items (smaller, lighter, warmer sleeping bags are a necessity, as is a car charger for the laptop) and make arrangements to stop the mail and newspaper, etc. The normal “we’re away for a while” stuff.

Scott is feeling some better but still is being bothered by both the ribs and the knee. Amy’s knee is acting up as well. We’re not sure whether that is sympathy pain or something else. But dammit we’re going on this trip.

Curiously, Scott happens to know two people who live in Montana. One, a family friend he grew up with but hasn’t seen in many years, lives in Bozeman. The other moved out to Montana about a year ago and we’re still trying to get a bead on him. Hopefully we can see either or both of them while out and about. It's a big state.

We had been talking last year semi seriously about taking Bella camping with us someday. Two nights ago Bella escaped and went for one of her neighborhood romps. Amy was taking her out, they flushed a bunny and Bella was off. Scott remembered last year's two close nocturnal brushes with racoons, recalled reading that it's not unheard of to have bison wandering through campsites where we'll be heading and decided perhaps Bella would not be the greatest camping companion. We never did consider taking her with us this year, she'll be staying with Amy's mom as usual, but the idea of Bella and a buffalo separated by a tent flap added a chuckle to our morning.