Kalispell, MT
Montana: Land of Subarus and studded snow tires. I supposed it's not really a surprise how many Subaru vehicles are on the roads here, since they're marketed to the "outdoorsy" crowd. Don't get me wrong, pickup trucks are the most prevalent, and not wimpy half-tons either. 3/4 tons. One ton duallys. And diesels, too. Vroom. Here, almost every gas station we saw sells on-road diesel and quite a few have off-road diesel (50 cents cheaper with no road tax) as well. And it was interesting to hear the clicking of the studded snow tires, many passenger cars with them on all four wheels. It brought back memories from when I was a kid and we used an air-driven tool to insert the studs (they were like rivets) into the holes in the tires. In the Northeast these days, they're either banned or regulated, and they're a foreign concept in Phoenix. Out here, anything goes.
Montana: The Ten Commandments are alive and well. And posted on big signs in people's yards and on billboards along the highway. Who knew that people needed to be reminded so much? I suppose it's some kind of backlash to efforts to remove religious items from public spaces, or maybe it's just a local custom. Either way, over the top but it's a free country.
Montana: More casinos than any place on earth. Just about every convenience store in this state is a casino. Half of the non-chain restaurants are casinos. Now, these aren't casinos like we're used to, since our frame of reference is Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and the Indian Casinos in Connecticut, which are huge places. Nope, these are just small operations tucked into the back rooms of regular businesses, but there are hundreds of them. It's gotta be part of the reason there's no sales tax. Good news for us!
So, we're ready to leave Montana on our way to Canada. There's
still snow on the mountains and yesterday's showers brought out a short-lived rainbow, but the forecast calls for a reasonably good day for driving, sunny in the south and clouding up as we go north but no rain (or snow) predicted. We do have one last stop to make, though: a return to the tire shop to have them fix an installation problem with two of the new tires. We use automatic balancing rings on the coach instead of wheel weights. The rings have cutouts about the size of my fist for getting a pressure gauge and tire chuck to the valve stems, which face 
inward on the tag axle. Do you suppose they installed the tires with the valve stems in the right place? No, that would be too easy; they managed to get both of the rear tires mounted in the wrong place. Since we're going right by the shop and it's only 10 minutes away, I'll schedule our departure to coincide with their opening time. If it takes 1/2 hour, I'll be surprised.
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