Today was a big driving day for us with more than 400 miles covered across northern Montana. Pretty much a straight shot – flat, with small towns every 30 miles where we slowed from 60 to 35 mph.

It was late afternoon before we got hungry enough for lunch, or ‘linner’ we’ve begun calling it. We stopped at a Pizza Hut in the town of Havre (still not sure how to pronounce it) because, although it wasn’t at the top of our list, it was one of the few places open on a Saturday on Independence Day weekend. The town, which has a secret and extensive underground beneath its quiet street, has a fascinating history of operating numerous brothels, saloons, opium dens and storage facilities for liquor during prohibition.

Since we didn’t have reservations anywhere and it was the aforementioned holiday weekend, we were likely out of luck finding an open RV park anywhere. But Angela found a place, the Rancho RV Park in Wolf Point on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation that was completely empty except for the dilapidated motel – screen doors hung sideways, an old red and white two-tone ’67 GMC sunk into the mud and a cluster of lawn chairs, many of which had no seats in them. The mosquitoes were swarming – so thick in fact that I decided not to unhook the trailer and only plug in power. We had to scramble from the truck to the coach simply to avoid being swarmed.

That night, the cool prairie air swirled into our coach bringing the smell of honeysuckle and grass. And we slept well.