Today we went on an exploratory mission into Missoula. We had no idea what to look for so we started by heading to the old Fort Missoula Historical Museum right after we stopped for breakfast at Paul’s Pancake Parlor right down the street from the old fort. As usual, I had the chicken fried steak breakfast because I am on a pointless endeavor to find the best CFS in the USA. Paul’s had okay chicken fried steak and great hash browns. Peggy had a western omelette and stated that it was great. Prices were good – $22 for both of us to eat.
From Paul’s we found our way to the museum which is located in the middle of a pretty park. There are old military officer’s houses here that are very nice along with outdoor exhibits of logging stuff, a fire observation tower, an antique train station, an enormous underground root cellar equipped with military-grade ventilator stacks extending up through the parade ground and a very interesting train with a locomotive that was built by the Willamette Iron Works in Portland, Oregon. It has a drive mechanism that I have never seen in a locomotive previously; all the power stuff is on one side of the boiler and uses shafts and pinions to turn the wheels. Since all the power stuff is on one side, the boiler is offset from the centerline of the locomotive frame. It is a gorgeous example of mechanical engineering from a bygone era.
The indoor part of the museum houses exhibits about the fort in one wing and displays of Missoula artifacts in the other wing. It costs $3 a head for ancients like us to get in but it was worth the money. The lady at the front desk was quite sharp about the museum’s contents and the city of Missoula and was able to answer all our stupid questions about the exhibits and the area.
After quite a bit of malingering in the museum, we took a spin around this old military installation and scoped out the great architecture used in construction of some of the buildings. There is also a building they used for housing of POW Italian sailors caught within US waters during WWII. They also interned thousands of Japanese-American US citizens here during the war despite the fact that not even one US citizen of Japanese descent was ever charged with anything other than not being white. There were no German-American internment camps although there were many US citizens of German descent working for the Nazis during WWII. We seem to have a whitey problem in this country.
After leaving the fort and museum complex, we took a roundabout drive through downtown Missoula which is an attractive city of some 70,000 residents. There are many ornate and classic old residential buildings and the downtown area looks like what you would expect from Pretty Anytown, USA. The streets are wide, the Clark Fork River runs right through the middle of downtown, there seem to be ample parks for the citizens to enjoy and the surrounding hills and mountains are very attractive.
We found a real liquor store and were able to stock up on Irish Cream which is very expensive in Washington, the next state where we will stay after visiting Glacier National Park north of here. Peggy also found a good beer store and was able to acquire two six packs of Black Butte Porter, one of our favorite beverages.
On the way home we stopped at the nearby Flying J truck stop to see if we could find the dump station suggested by the park owner at our current digs at Jim and Mary’s RV Park. After circling the entire complex a couple times, we were stopped by a guy coming from whatever was at the end of the road we had erroneously taken in our dump station quest. He got us plumbed up and we now know where our recent sewage will soon find a home.
We took some pictures of some good stuff today and you can see them if you click here