Stopping over to visit friends in Missoula and a stop for another night in Columbus, Montana

We had gotten to know fellow Blue Birding friends, Ray and Mikel, at the Evergreen Rally in Washington at the beginning of August. We knew that they lived near Missoula, so I contacted Mikel to let her know that we thought we would stay overnight in the area and to see if we could meet up with them. They invited us to their home and to park Miss Doozie in their driveway. So nice!

Ray and Mikel took us out to Kodiak Jax...

Yummy pizza!

Miss Doozie in front of their house.

How nice to be on their driveway for the night!

Their Blue Bird nesting alongside the garage!

Mikel and Ray with Dwayne - we SO appreciated their hospitality!

The Bitterroot Mountains are out there - do you see them? No?

There they are - barely visible through the smoke.

Maybe a little more visible.

I was putting together a blog post as Dwayne drove and Miss Kitty occupied my lap!

I heard a noise behind me and looked around... Dwayne's cowboy hat had fallen (we have a rack that holds it up by the ceiling) and it had landed right on top of the distilled water container!

On Saturday, we had thought about stopping to see some areas as we crossed Montana, but the continued smokey skies kept us moving east until we reached Columbus, Montana.

Itch-Kep-Pe park is a city park with free camping accommodations (no hookups). I haven't been able to find anything that tells me about the name of the park...

Campground Rules - donations accepted.

A view down through the campground.

The fire ring and "fire wood" at the site where we parked.

Those are BIG pieces of firewood!

Bridge over Yellowstone River next to the park. See tubers who were coming down the river and eventually exited just at this location...

Dwayne taking a picture of the river.

We are kind of parked in the area where folks come in to use the river... but it was a large spot and we didn't have to unhook the Jeep. Something indicated that all of the sites have a fire ring, so since there is a fire ring next to us, we decided that it was a "spot".

It was a rather long day of driving for us - 7+ hours on the road though we stopped at a rest area and made lunch when a pretty good rain storm was going on. We planned a shorter driving day for Saturday.