Montana: Great Falls

I decided to take a detour and head to Great Falls. Not only do they have multiple Starbucks, and a library, but a Five on Black and a health food-oriented store. Sounded like a great place to get some work done before heading north.

The drive on highway 200 from Missoula was gorgeous! Green fields and pine-covered mountains. Once I got closer to Great Falls it started looking more like the Dakotas: desolate prairie. On the way I found the BLM campgrounds at Simms. I stayed one night there, all alone, and the after-work gang of men showed up with their cooler of beer, loudly talking about...high school? This is situation where I'd pick a bear over a man, or men. I was NOT comfortable to say the least. Some of the comments for this BLM site state the locals show up on the weekends and party loud and hard until two in the morning. That would not be a quiet and relaxing experience!

The next morning I got up at 3:30am to get to Starbucks when they opened to work. Driving in the dark through unfamiliar countryside was not fun, but after twenty miles my tire pressure warning light came on. It shouldn't do that if the tires have been warmed! Needless to say I was in a panic imagining myself stranded out in the middle of no where. The tires looked fine. I found a tire shop, but what was I going to do for four hours until they opened? I could not find my tire pressure gage. Finally I just drove to Great Falls, found the Starbucks, looked for a tire shop nearby, parked the van in their parking lot, and walked to Starbucks. Three hours later when the tire shop opened, I walked back. It was just the freezing temperatures. What a hassle!

I spent the next few days working at Starbucks and the library, eating Five on Black, doing a load of laundry, and washing the van. The second, third and fourth nights I stayed in the Walmart parking lot. This is the Walmart on the South side. The north side was creepy. Still, on Friday night a gang of teenage boys walked by near midnight, then two possibly drunken teenage girls, then motorcyclists. Nevermind, I had to move once because the RV that parked next to me had a barking dog that wouldn't show up and another RV parked across the parking spaces and his ass was blocking one of the exits. People are stupid and RVers who are thoughtless will ruin it for the rest of us! Good god, Great Falls is horrible.

Great Falls was horrible in so many ways. Lots of signs about meth addiction, anti-abortion, lots of homeless people, yards not mowed, run-down houses, men in the library using the internet to watch porn. The streets are strange, some one-way, some not, 2nd Street South vs. 2nd Street North vs. 2nd Avenue North vs. 2nd Avenue South. I prefer street names with some imagination. Hard to find my way around at times. But, unlike Missoula it has a lot of parks that have free parking. Some of the older neighborhoods had magnificent mansions and old style brick apartment houses. It's not a town I'd want to live in permanently, but it served its purpose.