Road Trip Diary Day 8/9

After May's 100th birthday party we headed south...but not before we made a quick stop at another relative's place where pumpkin had some crazy fun with an already dead bird that said relative's cat had killed and left in a branch of a tree.

Jaime drove from there and got stopped for speeding by the RCMP - that's Royal Canadian Mounted Police always-get-their-man for those who don't know - in Claresholm. When he came to the window she told him she was confused between the mph and kilometer dials and that she felt like she was going too fast and was slowing down. He said - seriously, he actually said this - I don't want to give you a ticket and since you promise not to speed I'm going to let you go this time." Shit, how did she cut that break? It wasn't even daughter's day. Well, at least I got to ask the mountie questions about the station in Fort McLeod and also the one in Claresholm...things I needed to know for my movie.

We kept heading south and made a quick stop in Fort McLeod. And yes, there is a fort:

And a river:

We kept moving on to our Day 8 final destination of Lethbridge...

...where we were staying with none other than the girl who's picture I posted back on Feb 3rd. I did finally find her online and did a little catching up through email and Facebook and she kindly invited us to stay at her house on our way through town.

Pumpkin couldn't have been happier when she met D.S.'s dog, Caesar.

He was a lot like Drama so they kicked it in the backyard and performed a little karaoke after dinner:

We took our sweet time getting on the road after a great dinner, a great sleep and a great breakfast even though we had a full agenda of location hunting on Day 9. While it was only 66 miles to the US border at Coutts, we also had to check out another border crossing 46 miles further west, where we finally crossed or maybe I should say almost didn't cross. I had forgotten to take my passport and green card out of my suitcase in the back of the car. When I went to get out of the car the border cop just about shot me...at a tiny one-small-building-no-town-in-sight border crossing. Sheesh, dude, I was just going to get my I.D.

By the time we made it into Montana we had received a call from John - our Montana film guide - telling me that he had been barfing since 4am (among other things) and wasn't going to able to meet us in Cut Bank as planned. He gave named a couple of towns he wanted us to look at, including Conrad, where we found this place:

Which I think needs to be renamed Disneyland Hotel North...


A couple or three hours after crossing the border and several anti-meth billboards, we arrived at our hotel in Great Falls, which I guess is the meth capital of Montana. John was still incapacitated - he looked like shit - so he gave me a map of Great Falls and sent me off to take my own pictures. I really loved the bus station and the schools but the place that really caught my eye had nothing to do with what I was looking for. This little establishment is on one of the main drags of Great Falls, smack dab in the middle of a bunch of casinos (whatever happened to having to go to Vegas to gamble?) and really couldn't believe the name they chose for this place:

I took this picture at 9:30 on a Saturday night and yes those are small children in there playing on a jungle gym. Wow...just wow.

Total miles: 218

Time in car: I dunno, maybe around 6 hours since we stopped a bunch.

Went to sleep: prolly around midnight.