Our first stop on the road trip adventure: Roy and Christy's house, in Milk River. Now, it's quite a miracle that we got there in the first place. Christy had told us two driveways after the national park entrance. Now Tina I and I were so engulfed in our conversation the first time around that we missed the first driveway completely, and we ended up driving down into some random person's driveway. We did a whole lot of backtracking and finally found the second driveway...so we took it. Now we started sensing something was wrong when the driveway just kept on going (this is a gravel driveway)....Tina and I wondered to ourselves how they even get out of there in the winter (do they pave? Do they park their car at the end and take the truck?) and none of this was ringing any bells to me (I had visited many times...but many years ago). And the cows looked at us like we didn't belong...which added to our uneasiness. Our fears were heightened when we reached a fork in the road! We chose a direction and went left....luckily there was a bridge (which I vaguely remember crossing when Roy would drive us on those many canoe trips) so we turned around. Then we saw some green grass and a driveway that I recognized (I base my directions solely on landmarks) so we took it and found the house!

It was close to 9pm by the time we got there...and all the lights were on in the house, so we parked the car and excitedly made our way to the front door and knocked. No answer. So we knocked again. Still no answer. Went upstairs and knocked...no one. Opened the door and said hello...still no answer. By this point Tina and I were definitely feeling a little awkward: we thought that maybe they had gone to bed and left the lights on for us...but we weren't really sure. We had brought some brie cheese, bread and wine, so we left it on the table and proceeded to walk down to the guest house to see if anyone was there. As we're walking and talking Tina thinks she hears something, so we stop and listen and there is absolutely no noise. She concludes it's our echo, from talking, so I try and test it out and yell...but it stops short and there is no echo whatsoever. We make our way down the hill, by the guest house, which is completely dark, and start making our way around the loop to go up by the house again. At this point we're right in front of the rock formation (below the main house) and I see someone. I tell Tina that there's a person in the rocks and she says "Ode, if that's a person, we should be worried" because if it WAS a person, they'd be looking at us (in silence), watching us from the rocks...and Tina mentioned something about Milk River Massacre. So I flash my pathetic bike light to the "person" and unfortunately the bike light only flashes about two feet in front of us. We realize, with much relief, that it is not a person, but a chair of some sort (which we find out later is an old art project of Dan's which consists of an electric chair and a skull). As we make our way up to the house we see Christy...so all is well and there is no Milk River Massacre or awkward camping on the front lawn! She had gone upstairs, seen the brie, bread and wine and figured we had arrived. They both hadn't heard us because they were downstairs watching the news.

The rest of the night was absolutely fantastic...we shared our stories about how we got there (Christy and Roy were amazed we managed to get there in the first place), we ate delicious food, and then proceeded to drinking a lot of red wine and having great conversations, which seemed to always get into politics, which was always very interesting. We went into the hot tub and then everyone just passed out.

The next day Christy made delicious waffles and we sat around, drank lots of coffee, chatted it up, and then attempted to take many pictures (with the timer...you know how it is).

We left feeling well rested, well fed, and promising Christy and Roy that we would listen to "top of the hour" news on the radio (which we did throughout or road trip!).