Well, the rain didn’t stop until the middle of Monday night. It came down steadily and fairly hard for over 24 hours. The tent continued to leak. We got what we could into the truck and hung out there after we got back from the library. I ventured outside in the rain to make myself some lunch. We went back into town for awhile. Then we all tried to get a few winks of sleep in the truck. This was not a very successful endeavor!
None of us could really move, so we had to choose a position and plan to pretty much stay in it--sitting up, legs bent and cramped, and no way to get comfortable. Heather decided to take a shower at midnight and when she wasn’t back after a fair amount of time, we stiffly marched over to the bathroom building to make sure all was well. It was--she said that the hot water felt good so she stayed there a long time. Then she stood outside the truck until 2 a.m. since the rain had pretty much stopped by then. My legs still hurt.
Morning came and we got stuff tossed into the truck. The sun was trying to burn off the fog, so we took the top off the tent and laid it in a sunny spot. We moved the tent there, too, to help it dry a bit, but first we had to turn it upside down to dump out the water! Finally we just folded it up and put it in a trash bag. Then off we went.
We had decided to go to Butte, Montana. We were planning to stop in Missoula for a few days first, but we never heard back from the person we contacted from the Directory for Traveling Friends so we figured we’d skip it. We looked up the mileage from Coeur d’Alene to Butte and it said 232 miles. Turns out it was really more like 275. That was longer than we’d wanted to drive in one day--especially this day when we were all operating on a couple of hours of sleep. Bill had it the worst, of course, since he had to drive! We stopped several times along the way.
When we crossed the border into Montana, it felt like we were making progress somehow, but we were not far into big sky country than that big sky was full of big grey clouds. No rain at first, though, so we held out hope. We really wanted to be able to put up our wet tent and have it dry. We figured we could put the sleeping bags in the dryer. A couple of hours in, there was a mist on the windshield. Half an hour before Butte there was splattering on the windshield and the wipers came on. Fifteen minutes out of Butte we stopped at a rest area again because Bill was practically hallucinating. We sat there, almost in tears, watching the rain fall hard. We all agreed that we could not sleep in the truck again. We were all still in pain and exhausted from the night before. I declared my intention to sleep in a wet and dripping tent if necessary. Bill started the truck and we drove the last few miles.
We found the campground and the rain stopped, though the big grey clouyds still filled the big sky. We got our tent site. We pulled out the tent and the sleeping bags and then--believe it or not--the clouds seemed to disappear and the sun came out. The sleeping bags dried. The tent was ready to go in half an hour. We were grateful. We all began to harbor fantasies of an early night and a full night of sleep!
