Give him a fire in his heart and a light in his eyes, give him the wild wind for a brother and the wild Montana skies

Facts about today:

1. This was the first time we encountered rain on our journey. It pretty much rained while we were in Idaho this morning, but we were back to the best weather in America by the time we reached Montana.

2. We Jamba-ed again. We stopped at the Jamba Juice in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho before setting off this morning. Apparently we only stop at Jamba Juices in Idaho. 

2. We listened to a few more cds today...Erik's cd entitled Idaho Potatoes or Music to Make You Think started out the morning. He told Holly later that he envisioned one of us listening to it as we traveled down the highway at midnight and the other one of us was asleep. I guess he doesn't know that we don't drive at night and have pretty much always been asleep before midnight. We're so exciting. Travis gave us a mix of mostly Irish songs--particularly enjoyable were those by the guy from the movie Once. Student Sean provided us with the first cd we received, which we gave a listen to today. Amanda's mix was made especially for Big Sky Country as most songs had to do with sky or stars or giants or that sort of thing. Mamie gave us a copy of the latest Dave Matthews Band cd, which is what we listened to as we traveled those 12 miles down a dirt road to the Project Vote Smart ranch. 

3. This was our first foray into Montana...make that 7 states on your personal "states visited" list I know you've been keeping. Go ahead, color it in on your map.

4. Holly drove those 12 miles down the dirt road to the ranch at about 15 miles an hour. Do the math...it took us a while. It's not a complaint that she was driving slow, just an observation. It seems particularly slow after having gone 80 mph down the highway (don't worry--the speed limit was 75). I'm glad she took the dirt road slowly--we didn't want any adventures out there today.

5. The picture above is us on a rope swing on the Project Vote Smart ranch. PVS (http://www.votesmart.org) is a non-partisan, non-profit organization created in the belief that a democracy needs a well-informed electorate, and you can't be well informed by watching campaign commercials or debates where they're trained to avoid really answering the question. They collect information on all kinds of political office holders and candidates, and provide it for free to the public. They run off of volunteers and donations. I did a 2 week internship out here in the summer of 2004 and again in 2005, and thought it would be fun to return, even for a short time. They have a 150 acre ranch just a few miles from the Continental Divide. You can hike, go out on the lake, fish, ride horses, all kinds of stuff. And the people are extremely welcoming. The PVS president and his wife live here in a house on the ranch, and we're staying in a room attached to the back of their house. Pretty nice for a free place to stay. Oh, and they feed us too. We're pretty cut off from civilization here, except for this wireless internet I suppose. No cell coverage. We'll volunteer for them tomorrow and explore a bit, then head out on Wednesday morning to Big Sky. The president, Richard, asked Holly to take some photos for them to use in brochures. His wife Adelaide asked her to take some pics that make office work look interesting, which Richard was doubtful could be done. He told Holly to just photoshop some giraffes in the pictures or something. I thought that was a great idea. Richard is the mastermind behind all of the strange additions to the ranch--a 2 story treehouse, a rope suspension bridge over a stream, a two story gazebo, and the rope swing we're sitting on. He's quite a character.

6. Final fact of the day: we didn't hit anything with our car today, we have 4 functioning tires, and we didn't have to spend any time at all at a Wal-Mart in Yakima.