Check out time at Camp Coeur d’Alene was 11am. So we packed up and, just before we were ready to go, we walked up the hill at the campground to the bathrooms for a final bathroom break before we left. As we were walking up, a lady complemented us on our teardrop (everyone loves teardrops… we get complements on ours all the time). She said that her family had used one until just recently with an attached galley tent. Since then they had upgraded to a cute small RV with California plates. They had just traveled from Glacier and Yellowstone before that, so it seemed they were doing our route in reverse.
After rounding everyone up, we rolled out at 11:15 and headed for Glacier National Park. We had originally planned to stop somewhere for lunch, but Gigi started complaining about being hungry, so I grabbed extremely nutricious travel food when we stopped for lunch consisting of: a chicken sandwich, 2 tubs of yogurt, a cheese stick, a package of cheese curds, and a bag of pretzels. The dairy industry loves us.
Amazingly, we rolled into Glacier at the perfectly respectable time of 4:30ish. In contrast to the last two nights of RV parks, Fish Creek campground is quiet and tranquil, full of Lodgepole Pines and Western Hemlock trees. Our campsite was at the end of B-loop, far enough from the creek so that the mosquitos weren’t terrible (although there were still plenty), but close enough that you could hear it softly babbling. There are certainly plenty of RVs around, but it’s a totally different feel and culture than the RV parks. I did miss the communal kitchen from Camp CDA; running hot water for doing dishes is a luxury that almost makes the whole RV camp thing worth it.
And that’s pretty much it. We went to a talk at the campground amphitheater where the ranger told us all about the Whitebark Pine tree and all the animals that depend on it. Afterwards, we went back to our camp site, roasted some marshmallows, picked up the camp, and went to bed, thus concluding our first day without a particularly interesting story such as swarming bugs or destroyed bicycles.