Day 6: First Day of Hiking

  Lil' Loki got to sleep in.  The hotel gave us ear plugs to help with the sounds of the trains going by, but those weren't a problem for me.  The problem was the loud guy in the lobby.

  We had breakfast at the Glacier Highland Restaurant.  The lady behind us told her husband that he doesn't get any more bread for the day and he was very grumpy about it, I don't blame him.  He also didn't want to scoot in his chair to let Bill sit.

  We stopped by the visitor center and then wondered around the Apgar area for a bit.  There was supposed to be a loop, but we couldn't find it.

  We did go to Lake McDonald where there was an Earthcache and a bunch of pretty rocks.  I wanted to scoop the whole beach up and take it home.  I even found a heart rock.

  Then we decided to drive up to Avalanche and hike out from there.  We passed a bunch of people on bicycles, they should really make a bike lane or a shoulder or something.

  It wasn't looking good for spots as we circled around.  As we were going to check out the temporary day parking I spotted an empty spot.  I was told I got a gold star for the day.

  We hiked the Avalanche Lake Trail and Trail to the Cedars.  It was 1.9 miles going upward to see the lake and about a 575ft elevation gain.  I didn't do too badly on it.

  On the way down we made a trail friend from Philadelphia, PA.  She was going to get an ice cream after she got back down, she said it was the only way she could get herself to do the hike.  She got her knees fixed about two years ago and said it has made a load of positive difference.

  Since right now it's more interesting to look outside the car window than it is to knit, I figured this is how I could give you an update on how the hat is going.

  We had lunch at Russell's On The Run, which is around the back side of the Lake McDonald Lodge.  There were lake tours by boat, but we would have had to hurry to make the 3pm one and we weren't that excited about the idea of hurrying lunch.  If we had gotten to the area sooner we might have tried harder to get a seat on the tour.

  Some people wanted to change shoes, I mostly just wanted to be off my feet for a bit so they would stop hurting.  I thought I had gotten off without any, but it turns out I got a blister on my little toe.

  We had talked about going back to the park, but ended up getting a drink at the hotel bar, which was in the same external building as the restaurant.  Then some of us went back to Paul Bunyan for some snacks since none of us were hungry enough for a whole meal.  They make some pretty good nachos.