Day 5 was a work day: Judy cleaned up the cabin, full of dead bugs from a year and a half of being closed up, and I cleaned up the wreckage of the greenhouse frame, salvaging usable pieces and bagging the rest. After, we loaded up Ben’s pickup and made a dump run, to the collection site conveniently located 6km west, just across the highway. Then we packed for the second leg of our trip.
Day 6: headed south with what we thought was plenty of time to make our 9:00am meeting, we got a ‘low fuel’ alarm near St. Ignatius. We planned to stop at a station between Arlee and Evaro, conveniently located on our side of the road. Unfortunately, the long hill climb out of Arlee led to fuel starvation, just short of the summit. I can’t remember the last time this happened (I do remember the time, 63 years ago, that I was with my dad when we ran out of gas and he poured a gallon of degreasing solvent from his refrigeration tool kit into the tank and got us home, despite running a bit rough) , but we’ve certainly come close often, making a practice of planning a stop after the warning light comes on.
We didn’t have any flammable solvent handy, but we could have assembled the bicycle and self-rescued, as the fuel stop was only 3km away, but then we would have a gas can we didn’t plan to use again. We have carried a roadside service plan through AARP for many years, and only used it once, when the battery failed last year while I was in “no lift” status after my surgery. So, we dialed the number (fortunately, one of our phones had service) and waited for the road service truck to arrive from Ronan, 50km behind us, where there had been plenty of fuel stops to choose from…
So, we ended up humbled and 30 minutes late to my appointment in Missoula, to meet with the consultant who took my place at the NIH lab when I didn’t renew my contract last fall. The project to release a web application I wrote 8 years ago continues to have complications, mostly due to its age–I had updated some parts over the years to new language upgrades as it migrated from old to new hardware and operating systems, but didn’t revise just for the sake of revision–and the fact I wrote it with a specific user audience and the configuration settings for a specific scientific instrument. Meanwhile, we’ve learned a lot about packaging software in various forms, and are still struggling with some issues with satisfying dependencies. Although the meeting was short, it was productive.
Grabbing a quick espresso on the way out of Missoula, we arrived at The Mill in Hamilton to find that the café there had changed hands and had a new menu and new name: The Cherry Street Cafe. I missed the caprese panini I was hoping for, but the roman crêpe was an excellent substitute. We have found yet another crêperie worth the trip (the other is in Kingston, Washington).
After another stop to drop Judy for a short visit with a friend who will have moved away by the time we return in June, I ended up at the laboratory visitor center, as a visitor this time, a bit later than planned, to find that everyone I knew to contact was away from their desks. Finally, I got someone to fetch me and spent time visiting with my former colleague, continuing the project discussion from the Missoula stop. I also found that the former owner of the Zaxan café at the Mill was running a lunch service at the lab, as well as providing her custom roasted coffee blends to local shops and eateries.
The too-short visit ended, and we continued south, over Lost Trail Pass, stopping for the night in Salmon, Idaho.