The last leg of our trip to Missoula from Kalispell. Summer is in high gear & the green grasses of spring are turning brown now. The weather is mild & still very cool at night.

Jim & Mary’s RV Park will be our home for the next week.  We are meeting Gary’s brother, Ted and his beautiful bride of 50+ years, Anne, here as they travel throughout the summer in their coach. We have spent so much time the last few years enjoying Missoula that we will be exploring things less obvious to share with you.  There are so many things to do here & we’ve written about most of them.  Hopefully, we will find some interesting places to visit.

Throughout Jim & Mary’s are floral delights, from simple flowerbeds to complex garden displays. They use quite a few native wildflowers as well as the colorful petunias, etc., to plant these creative displays. They change from year to year. We enjoy walking throughout the park to see what they’ve done to surprise their guests. At nightfall, when the flowers cannot be seen, there are a plethora of different ornamental solar lights placed in the flower beds to tickle your fancy with ‘changing color’ glass spheres and built-in solar lighted ‘butterflies’ & ‘hummingbirds’ made of tough plastic. A labor of love by the owners, who, by the way, are not Jim & Mary.

Sunset our first night.  The show goes on for about 10 minutes & changes constantly.  A nice segue to heading indoors to the comfort of our Roadhouse after a busy day.  Ted & Anne were already tucked in to their site when we arrived around noon.  We had a lovely ‘hello’ session & enjoyed dinner out with them.  Terrific day!

A great surprise!  On our second afternoon in Missoula, we were relaxing in the early evening when a car pulled up to our space. Lo & behold, our friends, Jean & Traves, had left their west coast travels & decided to surprise us in Missoula!  They had driven almost 400 miles in one day to get here. (That’s a lot of miles driving a motorhome!)  So, while Anne & Ted were busy with wedding activities (A relative of Anne’s was being married in a nearby town in a few days), we went to see 3 museums with Jean & Traves.  They were on the grounds of Fort Missoula.  The first of the two had comprehensive displays of business life in Missoula’s early days as well as the doings at the Fort in days of old.  Very, very interesting.

Are you old enough to remember the foot ‘x-ray’ machines commonly seen at shoe stores in the 40’s, maybe into the 50’s, before they were deemed dangerous & disappeared from the stores?  To make sure the shoes you were choosing fit properly, you would stand with your feet tucked in the machine at the bottom while you, the shoe clerk &, in the case of a child, the parent would gaze through those gray thingies on the top & look at your foot bones & how they fit in the shoes. I remember seeing this at least once in my very young years.  Unlike the gray tones of a hospital xray, the foot bones were shown in green tones.  Just one of the displays at the museum.

Neatly & concisely, the story of Fort Missoula is told.  One of the commanders, in days of old, thought it would be a good idea to start a bicycle unit.  The black ‘buffalo soldiers’ were encouraged to sign up for this. A very successful endeavor with these soldiers overcoming incredible odds to make this a success. However, those in power decided not to go forward with this innovative idea.  Moving forward, this museum highlights the stories of the Italian men,  working legally with papers in the U.S. or on Italian merchant ships in U.S. waters, rounded up by the U.S. government & interred at Fort Missoula for the WWII duration. These men were grabbed as diplomatic relations deteriorated & we were about to go to war with Italy. They were treated well & seemed to enjoy their imprisonment.  Who knew all this stuff?  Learned a lot & enjoyed it!

Quite a number of uniforms & such depicting the different times on the base were on display in glass cases. A nightmare to try to effectively photograph with the lighting reflecting off the glass.  The best I could do was this headgear & epaulet display. The display included the uniforms one might expect to see, but also included very colorful officers’ uniforms that surprised me with their complexity.  None of them looked very comfortable.

The timber industry has an important & long history throughout Montana & this train (part of a larger display) was a portable sawmill used in Montana.  The outdoor museum on the Fort’s grounds included a number of displays regarding the timber industry.  It also had a restored train station from Drummond, including the tracks & signal signs.

We stepped into the 2nd indoor museum at Ft. Missoula.  It takes you through the different wars the U. S. has fought in, up to Iraq. As we roamed through, I was struck by the story of Louis Charlo and another piece of history that I did not know.  Below, please read about this exceptional young man & forgive the picture on the left. Once again, lighting & glass cases do not make photography easy.

Louis Charlo was part of the FIRST flag raising on Iwo Jima.  Please read the story above. Joining the Marines at age 17, he was killed less than a year & one-half later, leaving behind a legacy of bravery in a historical battle while serving his country with honor. The flag seen in the picture on the right was from the U.S.S. Missoula & sat atop a 20 ft. section of pipe. One of many stories told in this museum.

Getting ready to enjoy an early dinner at Fudrucker’s (not sure I spelled that right), Ted, Anne & Gary wait for their meals while Jean & Traves are ordering theirs. Below, we are enjoying our vittles as a kind patron used my camera to get all six of us.

The last time the six of us were together was in 2004, when we were in Alaska together, along with two other couples.

Along with beautiful flower displays, Jim & Mary’s RV Park has entertainment each week when a duo comes to sing & share their Montana experiences with the Park’s guests. We’ve written about them before.The owners occasionally host a one-time show.  This show is about the art of whips. Yep. A young man, inspired by Indiana Jones movies, who has become an expert with whips entertains us with his self-taught talent. A junior at the local high school, he enthralled us with his talent. A first-time performer, he went through his routine with the confidence of a more seasoned entertainer.  The picture on the left is of him and the Park owners. It was a fun show.

A part of the audience watches & takes pictures as our whip expert, hidden by the center post, gets ready to snap the stem of a flower held by the kid in the turquoise shirt. Everyone held their breath as the whip snapped.  And clapped as they smiled as the flower act was successful.

As proud grandpa stands behind his whip-snapper grandson (hidden by the ‘flower girl’), the whip is unfurled (the whip is by her left ear) as she calmly waits for the beheading of both flowers. Cheers erupted as the flowers’ stems were cleanly snapped off.