When adventures go awry

One of the most significant things I’ve learned as a young adult is that things don’t always go my way. In fact, sometimes they go the complete the opposite. And that’s exactly what happened tonight. And it was ridiculous.

It all started at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, when Chris and I left Moscow to drive to Glacier National Park in western Montana: my favorite place in the whole world. We arrived around 10:30 p.m. only to find that all of our favorite campgrounds were full. We decided to go primitive and camp in Logging Creek, a small first-come first-serve campground in northwestern Glacier. The only problem was, we couldn’t find it. We bounced around on a washboard gravel road in the pitch black night for half an hour until the passenger side headlight vibrated out of its socket and our gas tank read nearly empty. And that was when we realized we were only a handful of miles away from the Canadian border.

We flipped a U-turn, rushed to a gas station in Columbia Falls, MT where I promptly doused my left hand in gasoline trying to find the gas tank in the dark. For the next three hours, we searched four different campgrounds nearby and called 19 hotels before finally landing in a motel in Whitefish, MT, about 30 minutes from Glacier. A nice old lady handed us our room keys around 1:30 a.m., one of which Chris broke off in a master lock not five minutes later.

And that’s the tale of our epic camping trip thus far. It was so completely bonkers that it’s actually kind of funny.

And the sad part is we haven’t even gotten into bear territory yet…