Eric’s Blog

Wednesday, June 25th, 2014
Today, we decided to do nothing, because yesterday’s hike tired everyone out. I actually woke up at 9:30am after a good night’s sleep, and checked out at around 10am. Then I picked up Cassie and Erin from their C-4 cabin.

We went to eat breakfast at Swiftmotor Inn cafe. It was a decent meal. I had the whole wheat gnoichi while the others had a house salad and a chicken wrap. They were all decent, but nothing to write home about. The juice and milk were expensive, though, at $2.50 a piece.

Roesni was eventually able to join us after breakfast. I got some beer from the convenience store, the wheat lager with huckleberry was pretty good. We went back to Many Glacier to get Roesni’s laundry detergent and then dropped her off at Swiftcurrent.

Then we were on our way back to West Glacier and Whitefish, but before that we decided that since we were close to the Canadian border, to go and take a look. I made a mistake of driving past the US border. We turned back before the Canadian border, but it was too late since we had to drive through the checkpoint. The police detained us for about 15 minutes before letting us go. That was a bullet dodged.

Then we drove directly to Columbia Falls, but not before I stopped by Exxon for gas. In retrospect, I probably should have stopped elsewhere for gas because that was probably the most expensive gas station I have encountered, and I could have added less gas because I only had to return the car empty, but, whatever.

When we got to Columbia Falls, Erin realized that this was just a city’s name and not an actual fall, so we continued to Kalispell. We stopped by a casino and gambled a little bit, they lost $1, I lost $2. We stopped by the mall, but none of us really wanted to shop. Cassie and Erin both checked their grades on my at&t phone because they had t-mobile and couldn’t use their phone for internet.

We decided that dinner that day would be at The Shak, which is an upscale fast-food restaurant in Whitefish. We got the combo 2 pieces of fried chicken, 1 plate of beef brisket, 1 smoked potato, and 1 smoked potatoe salad. It was all very excellent, and made me glad that I did not go to the Chinese restaurant called “Cheng’s Garden 鄭家園.” I am glad that we looked at yelp for reviews. While eating, I decided that it would be a good idea to check the times for the train because I know trains often get delayed. We discovered that the train is delayed about 5 hours! So that means we would get on the train around 4am. We found out later that the train would be delayed more than 6 hours, and we got on at 5:30am.

This made Erin depressed as she only wanted to go back to Seattle, but now we all found out that we would have to wait longer for that to happen. We decided that there was really nothing that we could do, so we still drove back to the train station, which was not open until 9:30pm. It was 8:30pm when we first visited, but then we drove to a gas station and used their restrooms.

We waited in the train staion for soooooo long. Our train 7 Empire Builder arrived after the Eastbound Empire Builder 8 sister train :'(, which was scheduled to arrive 5 hours after our train. We left at 5:53am finally.

My right pinkie knuckle is still hurting from when I punched a street pole out of frustration on missing my train to Whitefish, MT.