Here’s something important to know about me: I loooooove fossils. I mean, I was very nearly a paleontologist. So, when I discovered there was this park in Montana – Makoshika – that had a ton of fossils you could see on the grounds, I plopped us down there for a few days.

The RV park we were at in Glendive was very inexpensive, but was clean and had all the utilities. It was essentially in the industrial part of town, but only a few blocks from the park, and very near a laundromat and a car wash (which was also a must at this point as MN was BUGGY). The morning that laundry had to be done, Chris was at virtual work, so the task fell to me. Now I sat in that laundromat for a good two hours and saw only men coming and going. Towards the end of my stay, a woman came in and I told her she was the first woman I’d seen in hours. I asked her if perhaps Glendive was a town where the woman all got their men to do laundry. She laughed and said that no, in fact, the railroaders come off the train and do all their laundry on certain mornings and then they’re off again. She said that most days it was women in there. Ah well, my fantasy bubble was burst.

The next day, we had our first scheduled activity. For ten bucks a head, we were given a behind the scenes tour of Makoshika’s paleontological lab and were taken on a hike by the on-staff paleontologist and park ranger. It was so incredible to see all the fossils they had pulled from this park, and we even get to see some hadrosaur bones in the ground along our hike.

A bizarre, yet fun, feature of this park that we were unaware of was that it was home to a disc golf range. It’s like frisbee into metal nets on poles far away. It’s played like, well, like golfing with a frisbee-disc. Matthew bought one and tried his hand at a few holes. Baskets? Nets? Anyway. He enjoyed it.

In other news, the noxious gas detector went haywire in the middle of the night, scaring us and the dog (see picture for where we found her when it all went down). There were no gasses leaking anywhere. This is something that was supposedly fixed before we left but obviously it was not. So, I did a little on the spot electrical wire removal to yank that thing out of the wall and then I was able to order a new plug in model from a local hardware store over the internet. At midnight. I was able to pick it up the next day. Ahhh modern convenience.