Glacier National Park

Glacier National Park
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After Crater Lake, we drove on to Bend, Oregon which sits along the Deschutes River. It is an up and coming resort community with plenty of golf courses to choose from. Scott did quite the research and we ended up golfing at Aspen Lakes. It was a nice red sand course with some beautiful mountain views surrounding it.  During our stop in Bend, we got some great advice from Melanie at the Wine Shop in the old district (highly recommended wine shop!) for some wineries in Yakima Valley as that was our next destination.

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Yakima is interesting in that it has some really great wineries, but really hasn’t yet capitalized on the tourism thing quite yet. Many wineries weren’t even open during the week and very few hotels and restaurants to court the tourists. That being said, we did find some good wineries – two of which were in the Red Mountain appelation which produces some great Cabs and Syrahs. After we loaded up at the local market for freshly picked ranier cherries, we hit the road to make our way to Montana.

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On our way, we made a stop in Idaho for more golf. We ended up at the Circling Raven Casino Hotel just south of Coeur d’ Alene rather than the Coeur d’ Alene Resort as the golf course was rated better and it was a quarter of the price with their stay and play package (great deal!). When we arrived and saw the course, we decided to stay two nights and play two rounds we liked it so much. We played with a gentleman from Spokane who confimed that we made good choice between the two courses.

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The following morning we were off making our way to Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana. However, we found out that the road (Logan Pass) that runs through the center of the Park from west to east was washed out due to very heavy rains last November and wasn’t scheduled to open for a couple of days. This made it a little more difficult in that we had to drive around the park to check out the eastern side of the park. Both sides offered the same stunning views of the glaciers, falls and lakes, but the lake color was more beautiful with the greenish turquoise from the glacier waters I thought on the east side. There were plenty of notices for bear run ins on both sides of the park. We already had one black bear run in some years ago in Canada, and didn’t want to have another one. Luckily, the only bear that we saw was a beatiful grizzly from the side of the road eating in the meadow a very safe distance away. Good enough for us.

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We are now on the home stretch and now plan on visiting family in No Dak before getting back home next week.

Our plans are then completely open for the remainder of the summer, so who knows what we’ll end up doing and if we'll do more traveling this summer. Perhaps a road trip out to the northeast as we’ve really enjoyed this one. For sure, we will be heading to Asia, New Zealand and Australia late this fall, so at minimum we’ll pick up our blog again then!

Happy travels!