Road to Malta

Hello from Malta, MT (most definitely not the island in the Mediterranean), where the wifi is far more reliable than it was in Missoula, despite the fact that Malta is barely a fraction of the size.

409 miles, three bathroom breaks and more than a few snow flurries later and we are here.

We left super early this morning in the middle of some serious snow fall and ended up taking a longer route on the road more traveled because it was the road that had actually been plowed (sorry, Robert Frost). I drove up through some beautiful mountains, then down some very scary ones until we got to Helena where Mandy took over the driving for a while. More mountains but not much of anything else got us to Great Falls where we stopped for lunch. After Great Falls, there was pretty much nothing for several hundred miles. Just flat. Flat. Flat. Flat. We drove down US 2 -- a two lane highway that seems to go on forever and occasionally crosses paths with a town, if that's what you want to call these places. We didn't make a lot of friends here -- the cars behind us weren't too pleased that we were actually driving the speed limit, but hey, if you want to go more than 70mph in a giant truck that you've only had for two weeks that doesn't belong to you and is filled to the brim with heavy lighting equipment and potentially dangerous props, be my guest.

We did see plenty of cows, however. All day. All the cows.

On US 2, we passed a sign for the world's largest tractor, except we didn't actually get to see the world's largest tractor because it was not in it's designated parking spot! Pretty inconsiderate if you ask me. One thing I really like about driving in Montana is that they occasionally have these little signs on one side of the road or another that say "Historical Point 1 mile" and then after you've driven a mile, you see another sign that simply says "Historical Point" with an arrow pointing in the direction of the supposed "Historic Point." WHAT ARE THESE PLACES!!! I want to know but I can't just pull off to the side of the highway when there isn't any designated area to actually pull off!!! They don't tell you anything other than the fact that there is something historic in a general direction and we must have passed at least 20 of these things on our drive and this is some US history that I'll never get to know!!! Wah.

Also, apparently Lewis and Clark went through Montana? This was news to us (sorry to whatever teacher I clearly wasn't paying attention to in history class), but every other town has something named after them.

Another reassuring thing about driving in Montana is when your GPS tells you to drive about 100 miles on a road called Last Chance Gulch. Because that's exactly what you want to be thinking as you drive down an icy mountain that has a speed limit of 25mph.

All in all, today was a great drive though! We even got to drive through Chinook, which is where we will be next week (although there isn't much to do there from the looks of it). Auditions (and maybe some exploring) tomorrow!!

Mandy took this while I was preoccupied with the big mountain I mentioned