We had chosen the TownPlace Suites in Gillete in part because I knew I was going to have a work-morning this morning. I had a handful of meetings to attend, and just needed to check in and make sure nothing had fallen apart in my absence. I have to hand it to my team! While I did do some check-ins, things continued remarkably smoothly during this wander. Working all morning does slow down the exploring, though!
It meant that much of the afternoon was driving rather than exploring. Our destination for tonight was Glendive, MT. This day marked the farthest west we would go on this trip in Miles City, MT.
That didn’t mean no exploring, though! We did stop at the Matthews Recreation Area and watched the russhing Yellowstone River, along which runs the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. We couldn’t get away from those guys!
Along the backroad paralleling I-94 from which we accessed the Matthews Recreation Area was another attraction that was just too tempting to pass up: “Creepy Crawler Giant Baby Art”. So, we let Google guide us there. This was problem 1 of the day. Google directed us down some farmer’s driveway and back into his field where we were apparently supposed to do the last little bit on foot. I probably got a little further onto his land than most sane folk would have gone becuase, “Hey, I’m in a pickup truck! I can go anywhere!” Said farmer came out and had a chat with us. All things considered, he was quite civil and explained that the only way to see “Creepy Crawler Giant Baby Art” was from the highway (I-94) that we weren’t on! We thanked him, apologized and made a hasty departure.
We stopped for dinner at the Gust Hauf where we enjoyed some Montana pizza that was better than we expected. Though, TBH, our expectations for Montana pizza weren’t that high. It was a pretty hopping place. When we arrived, the wait was going to be so long, we decided to go check into our hotel and come back later. Even coming back after a hotel saga (below) the place was still quite busy including a youth basketball team.
For the hotel saga, we had been usually booking our hotel stays through Hotwire trying to get a good deal on last-minute bookings. Generally, with a little bit of sleuthing, we could get a pretty good sense of where we’d be staying, and it worked out quite well. We were somewhat surprised when Hotwire told us we’d be staying at the Glendive Lodge. Definitely not a national brand that we were aware of. We always book a single room for 3 adults, expecting 2 queen-sized beds. Every now and again, there’s a sleeping couch or something for the youngest one. When we checked in at the Glendive Lodge, they said that they had no such configuration available. But after a little back-and-forth with a manager on the phone, they determined that they could put a cot in one of the rooms on the basement floor to accomodate us. We begrudingly accepted since we’d already paid for the room. The lodge staff gave us a (physical) key and sent us off to the dank basement room with insufficient bedding. When we got to the room, it was not clean. And I don’t mean “dusty”; I mean left over pizza boxes, candy wrappers and towels on the floor. Just had not been serviced. We wanted out. But there was nothing else available. That youth basketball team that had made the restaurant busy was there for a tournament making everything in town busy. There was not just no other room at the Glendive Lodge, there was no other room in Glendive at all. After a lot of back and forth with Glendive Lodge staff (friendly, and apologetic) and Hotwire (curt and reluctant to refund), we finally got the credit card reimbursed and kept going on our journey. We ended up not spending a night in Montana after all. Instead, we continued on into North Dakota. Finally arriving to the (much cleaner and less dank) Candlewood Suites in Dickinson, ND. We liked it there enough that we stayed there after our Theodore Rosevelt National Park stay as well.