With our bellies full from a delicious breakfast at the Bear Paw Cafe, we pulled out of the West Glacier KOA Resort at noon on Saturday to head west for two days of driving and one night of boondocking before reaching out next campground – Glacier Peak Resort and Winery – at the foot of the North Cascades in Rockport, Washington.
The drive through northwest Montana and into Idaho offered a lot more towns and roadside stops than our drive through the rest of the state of Montana. Our first mid-afternoon rest stop was at the adorable Travel Center in Regis, Montana, advertising their Huckleberry milkshakes as the “Best. Shakes. Ever.” We stopped, picked up a couple of Montana huckleberry-theme souvenirs for family and friends, and shared two shakes as the main staple of our lunch. The shop was adorable and even offered a trout aquarium, and we all agreed that, yes – the shakes might have been the best we’ve ever had!
We made great time across Montana and the panhandle of Idaho, and decided to stop for a dinner picnic at a Cabela’s situated right on the Idaho/Washington border. With plenty of RV parking – and even an offer to stay and camp for up to 48 hours – it was an easy parking stop, and it felt good to move our legs walking around a big Cabela’s store. It was also fun to see how the animal displays differed from our East Coast Cabela’s, with pronghorns, prairie dogs, marmots, and prairie rattlesnakes. You don’t see those animals in Pennsylvania, but we’ve gotten to see them in the wild AND stuffed at Cabela’s on this trip! (Thankfully we haven’t seen a prairie rattlesnake in real life!)
No one had any interest in eating anything that would require me to fire up the camp stove in the parking lot, so I made up a few sandwiches for dinner on the road, and we headed back on to 90 West, excited to make it to Grand Coulee, WA for the night before heading into the North Cascades on Sunday. Just as we crossed the Washington border on 90, boom. We all felt and heard it, and I could see the shrapnel flying my passenger side-view mirror. We blew ANOTHER tire.
Unlike our blowout in Minnesota, we were nowhere near an off-ramp and were in a really terrible position to need to change a tire on the road. We limped to the shoulder of the on-ramp where the traffic was at least a bit slower, and I took the boys over the concrete barriers and started making phone calls for tires (we didn’t want to travel without a spare) and Mike began changing the second tire of our trip.
Sometimes in life, you meet someone who is so good that it makes you question how good of a human you are, and inspires you to want to be better. That happened for Mike and I when Justin, manager of the local Liberty Lake Les Schwab Tires, pulled up behind us and got out of his truck to help. He was on his way home from work (it was 6:30 pm on a Saturday, and I was having very little luck finding any ST205 R75/15 tires in stock in eastern Washington and no luck finding a tire shop that opened again before Monday morning). Mike was just finishing up getting the spare on, and I showed Justin how I had found a store down the road with three of our tires (with rims) in stock. He grimaced at the price, AND at the idea of us having to install them on the road (we had decided at this point, and Justin confirmed, that we should have replaced all of our camper tires before this trip, and now we were hoping to do just that).
Justin invited us up the road to his Les Schwab store, where he unlocked the store, put on a movie for our boys, offered them popcorn, and replaced the three remaining original tires on our camper. At 7 pm. On a Saturday night. Who does that? Who is that kind? Justin is, and we are indebted to him. We hope to pay it back by returning the kindness where we can. He genuinely saved our trip.
We made it to Grand Coulee to boondock for the night, and got up early to do our third grocery run of the trip, and continued west. Along Route 20, we drove through the cutest town of Winthrop, Washington, where we spent an hour or so walking the adorable downtown, and ate our picnic lunch riverside while our 7 yo did a little fishing.
After one more stop at the quaint Mazama General Store on Route 20, we headed into the Ross Lake Recreation area on Route 20 where it becomes the North Cascades Highway. Driving that road with a travel trailer attached isn’t for the faint of heart – up and down the mountains. We had to pull over numerous times to let traffic behind us go by. But the road offered stunning views of the snow-peaked mountains and aquamarine lake waters of North Cascades National Park.\
We pulled into our campground, Glacier Peak Resort and Winery, in Rockport, WA early evening Sunday. We set up, ate dinner, and headed down the river trail across the road for a little fishing and splashing in the Skagit River. The campground was quiet, and made for a great place to enjoy campfires, practice guitar, read books, and watch Goonies in preparation for our visit to the Oregon Coast later in our trip!
With new tires under us, and a new set of mountains above us, we slept well, ready to tackle North Cascades National Park Monday morning.
