We (Angela, Bree, Jan) have breakfast in our New Haven hotel and then plan out the errands we have today. There are still a few things Bree needs for school that we haven’t already ordered ahead of time or brought from home.
The first stop is a nearby pharmacy for things like soap and shampoo. We also stop at a store on Chapel Avenue called Uni-Home Life that sells cute things, although Bree doesn’t find anything cute she really needs for her dorm room.
We meet Liya for lunch at Olmo Bagels, then go to Ikea for some furnishings. As on all Ikea trips, when we reach the restaurant marking the maze’s halfway point we’re already exhausted by decision fatigue. Bree picks out a rug and some fake plants (they won’t die over long school breaks). She needs a single bowl and plate for dorm mug nights, but all the good patterns are only available in 4- or 8-packs; she settles for a boring ochre color. She finds a handsome standing mirror which is large — we’re glad we rented a slightly larger car so we can the mirror and rug in it.
Liya joins us for dinner at Heirloom. Unfortunately, Angela doesn’t feel well; she has a bit of chest pain and some trouble breathing. She ends up calling 911 and they send an ambulance. The EMTs say that everything looks okay, and by the time they’re done Angela’s feeling better, so she declines the offer to go to a hospital. [By the following morning, she’ll feel fine.]
The hotel has advised us that there’s a marathon running through downtown New Haven tomorrow. That will prevent us from getting our car out of the parking garage, so we get the car out. The car’s currently packed with most of Bree’s luggage for school. We take it all over to Liya’s apartment so it’ll be safe when the car’s parked outside overnight.
We park the car on a side street near the hotel. When we’re back in our rooms, Jan checks the actual marathon route, and it turns out the car’s parked in the middle of the marathon loop — while we’ll be able to get in the car in the morning, we will probably have trouble actually leaving the area. Jan ends up moving the car to other outside of the marathon loop and walking back to the hotel.
Today’s the big day: Bree starts at Choate! She’ll be a junior.
Bree checks out of her room, then we walk to the nearby Maison B Cafe to have breakfast. As we eat, groups of marathon runners are jogging past. We walk to the other side of the marathon route and collect our car.
At Liya’s apartment, we move all Bree’s luggage and shipping boxes into the car — everything fits, but it’s a good thing we have a larger rental. Bree and Liya say goodbye to each other. They’ll only be about a 20-minute car ride or a short train ride from each other, so hopefully they’ll be able to see each other occasionally.
We arrive at Choate just after 10:00 am and begin the new student registration process at St. John Hall. As per long-standing school tradition, all the seniors are walking around the campus wearing bright yellow T-shirts with the words, “May I Help You?”. Bree gets a student ID, books from the bookstore, and some other tasks taken care of.
We drive over to McCook, the same dorm Evan lived in when he was at Choate. We’re greeted by one of the McCook prefects in a “May I Help You?” T-shirt, and also meet Kathryn, a nice house advisor we remember from Evan’s time.
Bree has been lucky enough to score a “dingle”: a double room that’s been assigned to a single person. She has an enormous space for one person, along with two desks, two armoires, etc. We begin by rearranging the furniture. Bree will have one desk looking out a window with a nice view of the arts center. There’s a bunch of packages to open for things like bedding, and we begin putting the bed together and generally unpacking.
We spot a black cat through a window: it’s one of Kathryn’s three cats. Bree’s delighted there are cats in the dorm; she already misses our two cats.
We have lunch at a temporary dining hall (the main dining hall is being renovated) then do some more unpacking. We break for an early afternoon welcome meeting at Colony Hall. Afterwards we meet Bree’s academic advisor, Beatrice. Beatrice has one other new student: Matt, a gigantic football player who doesn’t say very much.
Bree heads off for some new-student orientation stuff. We go Walmart to pick up some additional things, including some extra bedding so Bree can turn the second bed into a day bed. Afterwards we catch the end of a reception for new parents and talk with a couple from Seattle and some other new parents.
Bree meets us at the reception. On the way back to her dorm, we stop at a breezeway between Hill House and the Library. Jan has Bree pose at the top of a flight of stairs so he can reproduce a photo taken of him when he was at Choate.
It’s interesting that in the roughly 40 years since the first photo was taken, the school itself has changed: the tree behind Jan is gone, there’s a new building behind Bree, and it looks like the entire archway (with all its bricks and railings) was completely rebuilt at some point.
We return to Bree’s room for some final assistance with unpacking and setting things up. The room is starting to feel like someone lives in it, although the institutional cinder block walls are still bare.
Then it’s time for us to go and for Bree to start her first year living away at school. We make the short drive back to New Haven and return to Liya’s apartment. Our good friend Evrim is visiting Liya today from Brown University, and we’ve made arrangements to have dinner together. We go out for Thai food at a restaurant called September in Bangkok that’s pretty good.
After dinner we drop off Evrim for her return trip to Brown, then drop off Liya at her place.
We walk over to Olmo to meet Liya for bagels again. Liya has a class to get to, so we walk with her. She has to make a stop at the lab where she works, so we get a quick tour.
Our flight from Newark isn’t until the late afternoon, so we have time before we leave New Haven to see the Peabody Museum that reopened earlier this year. Angela already saw it in June, but it’s the first time for Jan. There are tons of interesting archeological exhibits.
We drive back to Newark, stopping along one of the Merritt Parkway’s tiny little roadside restaurant rest stops. We eat our lunch on a picnic table in the sun — it’s turning into a warm day.
At Newark Airport, we’re waiting in the jetway to board the plane to Seattle when we run into our Madison Park neighbors Margaret and Tad. They’re returning from a vacation on the New Jersey shore.
We get back home in the evening. Our cats are happy to see us (and to run outside for the first time in several days), but the house is very, very quiet.
For years our five-person family chat has been called “5 Spice House” (after five spice, a common seasoning blend in Asian cuisine). When Evan moved out, we started an additional chat called “4 Spice House”. With Liya away for the past few years, there’s also been a “3 Spice House”. But now we’re down to just a 2 Spice House.
We leave to spend a week in Montana and Alberta. When Bree was applying to boarding schools, Jan speculatively booked a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta so that we could distract ourselves a bit. Since Bree is now off to Choate, we’re going ahead with the trip. Glacier has been on Angela’s list of places to visit for a long time, and Jan liked the looks of the Waterton Lakes park just across the border.
After Angela’s done with her Sunday service, she comes home early and we take the light rail train down to SeaTac. The flight to Kalispell is fine but arrives a little late; by the time we land, it’s dark. That’s too bad — the drive to Glacier Park Lodge in East Glacier is probably scenic in the daytime.
The old lodge is nice enough, although our room on the ground floor has an extremely creaky wooden ceiling — we can hear every step of the people in the room above us. The walls are thin, too; someone in the next room coughs all night.
Waterton-Glacier trip, Day 1. We wake to a orangey hazy of forest fire smoke — there are fires throughout Montana. The scenic mountains to the west of the hotel are a little less dramatic when viewed through the sepia filter of the smoke.
We make the short drive into Glacier National Park and the Two Medicine area. The short walk to Running Eagle Falls is well worth it: the falls come out a huge hole the middle of a rocky cliff. The falls are a good choice for a hazy day like this; everything you can see close up still looks amazing.
We continue to the trailhead at Two Medicine Lake and make the easy hike to Aster Falls, where we eat a sack lunch. From there we hike up a little farther to the Aster Park overlook, which involves a short climb. Angela is happy when we make it back to the lake and the trailhead.
Just as we’re getting in our car, someone nearby points out a female bighorn sheep that’s grazing at the edge of the parking lot.
In the late afternoon we read in the hotel’s lounges. At one point the Amtrak Empire Builder train stops at the East Glacier Station just across a lawn from the lodge. Jan remembers taking that train from Chicago to Seattle with Lyn and Skye years ago, and remembers people getting off at this station.
Dinner in the lodge restaurant is pretty good although the portions are far too big; the pot roast Angela gets could feed three people. We are at a national park in the fall shoulder season, so everyone else in the restaurant has gray hair.
Waterton-Glacier trip, Day 2. The forest fire smoke has cleared! The vivid green of the enormous mountains to the west looks amazing against the blue sky this morning.
We have a quick breakfast at the coffee counter because we want to do a substantial day hike to the Grinnell Glacier today before heading across the border to Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada. We’ve learned that the border crossing we want to use closes at 6:00 pm, so we’ll need to beat that deadline to avoid a long detour to the next crossing.
We have a nice drive to the Many Glacier area, and are happily surprised that we score a decent parking spot only 0.2 miles from the Grinnell Glacier Trailhead. We gear up and walk to the trailhead — only to see a sign saying the trail is closed today for maintenance. We have to hurry back to the car and drive to the Swiftcurrent Trailhead by Many Glacier Lodge.
There’s a boat service that runs across Swiftcurrent Lake and Lake Josephine that can cut a few miles off the hike we’re doing, but tickets are sold out today. Although our hike will be longer, the walk along both lakes is basically flat, and it’s beautiful to see the mountains above the lakes.
After Lake Josephine, the trail begins a steady climb all the way up to the Grinnell Glacier overlook. Jan really doesn’t like the parts where the trail skirts the top of steep drops, but at least the trail is fairly wide.
Even though it’s now shoulder season, this popular trail is still full of people. At one point someone stops us to point out a bighorn ram standing on the rocks above us.
We finally make it to the overlook of the Grinnell Glacier and Upper Grinnell Lake. Since we’re pressed for time, we stop at the overlook to eat lunch and enjoy the view rather than continue all the way to the lake. As we’re eating, we hear a roar, and see chunks of the glacier calving into the lake and sending spray into the air.
We make good time on the hike down. For a while we walk with a chatty man from Miami who’s visited much of the U.S. on his motorcycle. We finally reach the flat part of the trail by Lake Josephine, but by now Angela’s very tired. We get back to Many Glacier Lodge with time enough to pick up cold drinks.
We drive north along a mostly empty highway, then turn off toward the Chief Mountain border crossing along a road through the woods that’s completely empty. Just short of the border we stop at the Belly River Trailhead so Jan can take a photo. That trailhead happens to be the eastern terminus of the 1,200 mile Pacific Northwest Trail. Jan’s hiked much of the PNT in Washington State, and it’s interesting to see the far end of this ribbon of dirt that goes all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
After speaking with a very serious Canadian border guard, we make the short drive into Waterton Lakes National Park and finally reach the Prince of Wales hotel at the north end of Upper Waterton Lake. The hotel is a fanciful building on a windswept hill with an outstanding view all the way down the long lake.
The lake has huge mountains running down both sides; the Blackfeet name for the lake translates as “The Lake between the Walls”.
Our room is on the hotel’s highest floor, the sixth. The hotel’s elevator only goes up to the fourth floor; from there we have to use staircases to reach our room. On the plus side, we have a balcony that looks out over the lake.
We have dinner at the hotel’s Royal Stewart Dining Room. Angela is so sleepy at the start of the meal that she says she might pitch forward onto the table. She orders a very nice trout and we finish with a banoffee tart.
Waterton-Glacier trip, Day 3. We’re tired from yesterday’s hike, so sleep in. We go into the small village of Waterton for breakfast at Tamarack outfitters, then stop by the Bayshore Inn to use their laundry facilities. When Jan goes back to move our clothes to the dryer, he finds some overprotective guest has locked everyone (including themselves) out of the laundry room, so Jan has to get the hotel staff to open it up again.
Lunch in the hotel’s Windsor Room includes a flaky mushroom pastry. Afterwards we go back into town for massages at a spa, then hang out in town until dinnertime.
We have Italian food for dinner at Red Rock Trattoria, one of the few businesses in town that stay open year-round. We’re seated next to an extremely chatty couple from New Orleans who talk with us for the entire meal.
Back in our room, we’re both reading when Angela sees something out of the corner of her eye. It’s a mouse running across the bed, then jumps down and somehow disappears. We can’t find any mouse hole in that area. The fact that there’s a mouse somewhere in or near the room unsettles Angela to the point where she doesn’t sleep well.
Waterton-Glacier trip, Day 4. The forecast calls for rain today, so we’re not planning any big excursions. We walk into town and have breakfast at a nondescript café.
We make a short drive to a spot marked on the map as “Bison Paddock”. This turns out to be a large, fenced-in area with a single entrance that has a large cattle grate. Apparently the thing to do is drive in and follow a loop road through the paddock while looking for bison.
We can’t actually see any bison, which is a little disappointing. Then, just before the loop takes us back to the entrance, we finally see a group of bison grazing on the brown grass. Eventually we count 20 bison, including some calves.
Driving back to the hotel, Jan sees two cars pulled over on the side of the road. In any national park this generally means some sort of wildlife will be visible, and this is no exception. We pull over and spot a mother bear and two cubs walking through a meadow towards a slope. The cubs are adorable, and small enough that, when they walk, only their ears poke out over the grass.
We return to the hotel before noon. We explain to the front desk about the mouse we saw. They offer to move us out of the mouse suite to a room on the fourth floor. We pack up and move rooms, then go downstairs for lunch. We have high tea, which is always fun.
In the afternoon we drive to Red Rock Canyon, a short easy walk along a deep ravine with striking dark red walls. It begins to rain, but we decide to extend the walk to see nearby Blakiston Falls about half a mile away. The rain jacket Angela brought for this trip doesn’t work well, so she makes do with a plastic poncho. It works okay but has the fashion appeal of a garbage bag.
On the drive back, we once again see some cars pulled over on the side of the road. We pull over and, far up on a hillside over the road, spot a mother bear and two cubs. We’re a few miles from where we saw bears this morning, but it’s possible that these are the same three bears we saw earlier.
Waterton-Glacier trip, Day 5. We have breakfast in hotel, and then pack up for a day hike to Bertha Lake. As we’re driving into town, Jan realizes that he’s wearing casual street shoes. He drops Angela off so she can shop at the Tamarack outdoor store while he goes back for his hiking shoes. Angela finds a rain jacket she likes and buys it. Jan picks her up and we drive to the trailhead at the south end of town.
Angela’s rain jacket turns out to be a prescient acquisition — although the weather forecast called for overcast skies with no precipitation, a short while into our hike it begins to rain. It stops after a while, then starts again; this continues all morning.
The trail parallels the short of Upper Waterton Lake for a while, cutting through the enormous 2017 burn that nearly engulfed the town. The trail reaches a lake overlook, then cuts inland and begins switchbacking up a steep hillside. We finally reach Bertha Lake, a pretty lake in a cirque with steep cliffs all around. It’s still drizzling on and off, and everything’s wet, so we end up eating our lunch standing up. We make our way back down the switchbacks and up the lake to our car.
Around 3:30 we head to the town’s marina to board a lake cruise on the M.V. International, a nearly 100 year-old wooden boat. As we’re waiting, a bus arrives and drops off a load of passengers for the boat tour.
The boat sets off at 4:00 for a trip down the lake, which spans the US-Canada border. The boat pauses when it reaches the border; we can see the small obelisk that serves as the border monument, along with the clearcut strip of forest that stretches along the 49th parallel on either side of the lake.
The boat eventually makes a short stop at the Goat Haunt ranger station at the south end of the lake. This point happens to lie on both the Pacific Northwest Trail and the much longer Continental Divide Trail. A park ranger gives our group a short talk about the area, then it’s time to board the boat for the return trip.
After we disembark in Waterton, we go to the Lakeshore Chophouse for dinner. Since it’s after the main tourist season, the town’s generally seemed pretty quiet, but the restaurant is mobbed with people. After a short wait we get a table, but the food’s just okay.
In the evening, the wind picks up. The Prince of Wales hotel is apparently famous (or infamous) for getting battered by the high winds that sweep down the lake. The hotel staff is blasé about the wind level this week, but to us it seems like a storm. Our new room is also cold; the tiny baseboard heater can’t warm it up enough. Our room happens to have two beds, so we strip a comforter from the second bed to make one warm-enough bed.
Waterton-Glacier trip, Day 6. Today we’re heading home, but it’ll be a long day — we’ll drive back into Montana, then drive through Glacier National Park before reaching Kalispell for our flight home.
We time our arrival at the border crossing so we reach it when it opens at 9:00 am. There’s already a bit of a line ahead of us, and the US border agent working the one open booth seems to be extra gruff and difficult about processing each car. At one point we end up parked directly next to a border obelisk, and once again marvel at the perfectly straight line of clearcut forest that marks the actual border.
We make our way south into Montana and stop at the St Mary’s visitor center on the eastern edge of Glacier. We fill up on gas, and then begin driving up Going-to-the-Sun Road, a 50-mile winding road that takes in a long list of sights. We make one or two stops, but sadly there are low clouds today. As we reach the road’s highest point at Logan Pass, visibility is cut to almost nothing. Jan can barely see the yellow dividing line on the road.
We’re hoping to make the short nature walk at Trail of the Cedars, but all the parking lots in the area are completely full. After circling for a while, we give up and drive on. We stop at Lake McDonald Lodge for lunch.
Our route takes us out of the west side of Glacier and towards Kalispell. As we reach the city, the route seems stranger and stranger to us — we’re driving on small roads and through housing developments. This doesn’t feel like the road to a major airport.
Eventually our driving route ends at Kalispell City Airport. This doesn’t look right. We actually want the newly-renamed Glacier Park International Airport, which is also in Kalispell, but on the other side of it. Luckily we still have enough time that we make our flight.
When we arrive back at SeaTac, we decide to get off the train at Othello to have dinner. After a week of traditional American/Canadian food, we’re both eager to have something different. We find a small Vietnamese place called Hoang Doung. It doesn’t look like much, but the food’s tasty.