Day 30: Grangeville ID - Whitefish MT

I haz a Shiny!!1!

Shiny Thing make everything all better

Big ups to Manager Mike at the Downtowner motel in Grangeville who gave me this Shiny in exchange for being allowed to bend my ear this morning.  He finally let me go, and it was down highway 13 to Kooskia, right onto US-12 and past one of my favourite road signs ever.

When your choice of motor-car is not tempting you to drive like an Hooligan the run up to Lolo Pass is approximately twice as scenic and even having to wait at the temporary traffic lights was no great hardship.  Anyway the traffic, such as it was, was nearly all going the other way.  I overtook two cars.  This is now the fourth time I've been along this stretch of road - twice in each direction - and it's still teh Aces.

Arthur contemplates the misery of having to wait at the lights amid all this ugliness

Ghastly, isn't it?

Mr Google found me an alternative route for part 2, as otherwise I'de have found myself flogging through the middle of Missoula and then either up the east side of Flathead Lake (which I did the other way in the smoke last year) or up US-93, which I remember as being horrid in 2009.  Instead I cut off the corner to reach I-90 and headed west for a while before describing a sizeable loop back to US-93 just south of Kalispell.  As motorways go, I-90 is a Good Motorway, or at least this bit of it is, and at one point there are no fewer than four bridges across the Clark Fork River practically on top of each other.  Because Joyce reads this nonsense:

Twin I-90 bridges off to the right behind those trees

and for everyone else, here are some people in a boat:

Rectangular thing at top left is a pillar of the I-90 W bridge...

Turned off at St. Regis to follow the Clark Fork River downstream on divers Montana state highways before being spat back onto US-93, which was just as horrid as it was nine years ago, although Flathead Lake is still as big and wet at is ever was.

Happily, Kalispell has had a new bypass installed since 2009 so I didn't have to go through the middle of it, and so to Whitefish.  The Downtowner (no relation) scores for being central and bijou but loses for having neither a fridge nor a table in the room.  So I am typing this on the bed, propped up on one elbow.  Which is how I managed to snap one of the arms off my specs.  Piss.  And the pizza place wasn't playing Neil Young like it was in 2009 either.  Piss encore.