A totally perfect day!

Today we spent the entire day in Glacier National Park. At one point Charlie said, "These parks are just incredible; one's better than the next." This pretty much sums up my feelings as well. Glacier is so incredible. There are these beautiful waterfalls that seem to materialize out of the rock itself. There are also what is called "weeping walls" where water literally rains out of the rock. How this happens is a mystery to me, but it is a sight to behold. We saw the glaciers, and snow pack that is not going to melt before the snow starts falling this year.

So today's activities went in this order: we woke up, did a load of laundry, the kids played in the campground playground while that was going on. We got on the road and stopped at a bear zoo. You drive your car in and you get to see black bears just roaming around, eating, sleeping, swimming and doing whatever it is bears do--which is mainly eating--these bears were born in captivity and I am not really sure if they prepare for hibernation like regular bears or what. Seeing the bears up so close was really cool, but the park itself was nothing to really write home about. After the bear park, we headed in to Glacier NP itself. We grabbed some sandwiches and headed up to Logan's Pass. This is the area of the park where you get to take a short hike and you can go play in the snow. It is also where we got to see a heap of wild animals. We got to see mountain goats, bighorn sheep, marmosets and squirrels. After the fun at Logan's Pass, we headed back down the mountain and we put the canoe in at McDonald Lake. This was just so incredible. The water was calm today. Yesterday, McDonald Lake was rough because it was very windy. We paddled around for about an hour and as we paddled back in to shore, there were two people setting up to play alp horns as the sun went down. I had never heard an alp horn before so this was totally cool. An alp horn is the Swedish National Instrument. You can see the picture of the two musicians here. After loading the canoe back up on the car, we headed off to eat dinner. We ended the day at a restaurant called Eddie's. National Park food is almost universally terrible. This food was not great, but they did have a bunch of huckleberry-based desserts. I got huckleberry cobbler, two of the kids had huckleberry ice cream. Prior to my trip to Glacier NP, the only huckleberry I had ever even heard of was Huckleberry Hound. I am not even sure if I was aware that huckleberries are actual berry. For those of you who are as ignorant as I was, a huckleberry is somewhat like a blueberry. The seed on the inside is much bigger so imagine the shape and size of a blueberry but the seed problem of a blackberry and you pretty much have the idea. They grow wild all over the place up here, and if the bears haven't eaten them first you can pick them and eat them right off the tree.

As we ate dinner we reflected on what a perfect day this has been. We don't know yet what we are doing tomorrow, but we are leaving this campground. We are considering heading off toward Cascade National Park in Washington. Another possibility is to head down toward Yellowstone and Teton, but if we do that, I may not ever come home. Charlie is looking at the map now as I type and is figuring out what is possible in the time we have left.

Enjoy the pictures from Glacier. The video is a panorama of McDonald Falls.