We don’t fly home until tomorrow (Saturday), but yesterday (Thursday) was our last travel day. We had a good-bye dinner with Josh and Michelle last night because they are flying home tomorrow, while we have one more day to explore Missoula, the home of the University of Montana and the only city in Montana which supports Democratic candidates 2 to 1.

Our meal was at Plonk, a downtown restaurant. We were all happy with our meals.

But the day itself was complex. We started in Kalispell, and headed north about halfway to Glacier Park to visit Hungry Horse Dam, one of the tallest in the country. It turned out that the visitor’s center was closed, and we could only see the dam from the security entrance to the dam grounds.

No problem, though, because the ride was so nice.

We then stopped at a roadside store where you could by a $600 hat made of skunk fur, and did a drive-by by another roadside store, this one sporting two Confederate flags (in Montana).

The road from Hungry Horse to Missoula led back through Kalispell, but I decided to detour through Whitefish for no real reason.

Maybe everyone knows it but us, but Whitefish is nothing like the other Montana towns we have traveled through. It was like being transported to another planet, where the stores are too expensive, but the tourists look like long term members of the billionaire class. I felt like we were outclassed by far, and I don’t know that I had that feeling ever before.

We went into a western themed women’s clothing store where some dresses were more than $5000, and where they were having a designer trunk show (presumably for female billionaires under 30) and which had a fancy back room bar.

Other stores had $60 t-shirts, and $100 short sleeve shirts.

Whitefish also has a railroad station designed to mirror a Glacier Park lodge with a city history museum inside. The museum has a bust of an Indian, whose face looks like it could start talking to you at any minute.

We had lunch just outside Whitefish, and took off for Missoula, thinking we would get here by 4 or so. We drove by Flathead Lake, 30 miles long, and filled with roadside cherry orchards, entered the Flathead Indian Reservation and then saw a sign to a bison range, which looked like something we shouldn’t skip. We did not realize that visiting this extraordinary facility would take over an hour. We saw bison, both at a far distance and up closer.

And we saw this fellow, a wild pronghorn.

The bison range is run by the Reservation and is an ecological triumph. The views are also magnificent.

For our last day here? 40% chance of rain. No agenda. We will see.