Glacier National Park

We had a great trip to Glacier, neither Dave nor I (nor Tommy for that matter) had been there before. We flew from San Jose to Kalispell, Montana where we rented a car and spent about a week in Glacier. It's quite a place! We were impressed with the very gorgeous vistas, waterfalls, wildlife and lakes. The park info estimates the glaciers will be melted in 30 years due to global warming, so now's the time to visit!

I packed for some seriously cold weather with boots, hats, gloves and thermal underwear but it was actually warmer there than it was at home on the Monterey Peninsula (summer fog...)

One of the nights in the hotel there was a scurrying and chewing and high pitched noises -they were pretty loud and totally awoke and freaked out Tommy. I wondered if there was a bat or a rat running around our room so I got out a flashlight but couldn't really see anything. So then I awoke Dave who had apparently not been too disturbed by either the noises or Tommy's freak out, and he thought the sounds were coming from inside the walls. At this point, I wouldn't have worried too much except that Tommy was so upset by the sounds, and it was 3 am. We called down to the front desk and their attitude was, "So?" Also they said "yeah we think there's bats living in that side of the hotel." We had them send up a fan to block the sound as there was no vacant room that we could move to.

Tommy tolerated the backpack long enough for us to do a few hikes. We did notice that during one of the hikes, Tommy suddenly said, "Oh no! Backpack!" but we didn't think much of it until we noticed he was sitting much lower in the backpack, with his face below the top. The harness had ripped underneath him - I was pretty surprised as Tommy is such a lightweight and the backpack is designed to hold at least twice his current weight! So we weren't sure what to do as it was the start of the trip and we had planned on hiking almost daily. Luckily the park hotels stock a small sewing kit in the rooms. So one day while Tommy was sleeping in the hotel room and Dave went on a run/hike by himself, I sewed up the ripped harness while sitting on the balcony enjoying the gorgeous view at Many Glacier Hotel!

It was a great trip and we even made it up to the Canadian side for a day (ok so it looks the same as the Montana side but we'd never been to Canada before and wanted to say we've been!) We rented a kayak on a lake up there and Dave and I each took a turn on it while the other played with Tommy on the beach so Tommy could enjoy his favorite activity of the trip - throwing rocks into the water.