DAY 22
Week 4
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK (Montana, USA)
Wednesday July 12th, 2006
TODAYS MILEAGE – 98 miles or 158 kilometres
TRIP MILEAGE – 2166 miles or 3486 kilometres
My last day at Glacier National Park.
Today I was just going to potter around Glacier National Park for a few hours and then make a quick trip to the resort town of Whitefish (Montana), 29 miles (47 kilometres) away. I got a couple of email's from people who said I should check it out and seeing as it wasn't that far, why not I thought.
Before I left I decided to check out the tow dolly lights as I checked them on the Trailblazer and assumed they'd work on the &Man Pad". I come to find out that I had a dead short somewhere, as it had blown the park lights, brake lights and indicator fuses on the RV. After two hours of troubleshooting, I found the fault about half way up the vehicle where someone had made the original connection for the trailer plug wiring.
Cool beans. I made a shopping list for the parts store and trundled off to Whitefish with Bonnie Rae keeping me company. Take note girls, there's something about us redheads!!! 
I parked up at the Montana Coffee Traders for a spot of lunch and boy was I impressed. The have a great and varied selection of fresh foods, plus the normal coffee shop crap that they have all become synonymous for. Add to this the 54 Mbps wireless connection and I was good to go. Oh, and before I forget, as an added bonus, there were so many good looking women here (i.e. could put a horn on a jellyfish type good looking) chatting, hanging out or reading. Can I stay??? Please, please pretty please???
That reminds me, if any of you (I've been getting 3500 - 4000 hits a day) have any suggestions at all at where I should go and have a look at, by all means email me and I'll stop by if I get early enough warning. It's all part of the fun. For example, Nathan & Danette suggested floating and fly fishing the Big Hole river, while Gump & Zan suggested checking out Flathead Lake. I had a wonderful time in both places.
I headed on back to Glacier National Park with my bag of goodies and spend and hour repairing the wiring fiasco. It was more like spaghetti, but that would be insulting the Italians.
While I'm remembering things, good on the Wogs for winning the soccer world cup, all be it after they beat Australia on a real suspect penalty kick. Funny to hear the media spin on things here in the US. The media was giddy in their reporting that the US was the only team not to lose to the eventual World Cup finalists. OK, they drew - BFD. Where was it reported that they didn't win a game and that Australia with 19 million people made the second round and with the U.S. at 380 million strong and ranked #5 in the world - they didn't???
I'm off my biased media reporting soapbox now.
With the wiring repaired, I tightened the alternator belt as it was slipping and squealing. I noticed that one spark plug lead had it's end blown off and another was cooking itself quite nicely on the exhaust manifold. Who knows how long my 454 V8 was only running on 6 cylinders???
I was planning on heading to Billings (Montana) tomorrow, so off I flew into Columbia Falls, like a bat out of hell, to make the 5 o'clock closing of the parts store. I covered the 20 miles (32 kilometres) journey at speeds that would have got me several nights of nice accommodations and 3 square meals a day should a blue light taxi been out and about.
One of the plug leads burnt off because of the way it was routed. The other one is because I have a split manifold that needs replacing. Chevrolet in their infinite wisdom decided to make pressed steel manifolds on these 454's in order to get temperatures up so that they could pass emissions. Wanna guess where my passenger side one has a split??? Yup, you guessed it - right on the joint. So if you know where I can get a set of cast iron anti-smog manifolds or headers to suit a 1988 454, let me know as I need to replace them pretty sharpish.
By 7:30PM I had fixed what I can (hopefully all that was wrong as I hit the road again tomorrow), took a tub without any of the Grizzly Adams types and decided to use the leftover Elk filet in a Thai curry. Should be good.
TTFN!!
Stay Happy