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Today is Friday August 18, and we are in Billings Montana at the KOA (the original KOA in the U.S.), and to celebrate, they charged me $38.00 a night….most that I’ve paid on this whole trip.  To make it worse, they advertise free cable TV, but it just happens that our site is excepted!  I’ve heard that KOA stands for “keep on adding”.  This place, and the place next door are packed….don’t know whether it’s because they’re located adjacent to Yellowstone, or people travelling to Sturgis SDak for the annual biking event.  Hope we can get past Sturgis before that happens….supposed to be thousands of motorcycles.

To bring you up to date on our “travails”, we spent all day Thursday at the Freightliner dealer in Missoula….found out the alternator on the MH was bad.  I expected the worst, and I got it.  I also knew that a FL dealer was about the most expensive place to have it replaced, but, it was the only game in town.  While I was at it, I also had them replace the air filter, which was due, and I thought maybe it had affected the overheating.  Got away with only $508.00!Guess that’s not too bad, just turned over 50,000 miles, and that is the most major expense in 5–1/2 years.  Also, the poor mechanic, had to climb on top of the motor (accessed by opening the hatch under the bed), and spent over two hours trying to get the old alternator out, and the new one in.  He had to cut one of the bolts out to get it loose.  Now I know why they charge $75.00 hour to work on trucks, and $90.00 hour to work on MH’s.

We said goodbye to  Sharron and Don in Missoula this morning.  They were going to Deer Lodge MT for a couple of days to attend the TriState Fair.  Deer Lodge is about 90 miles east of Missoula, very pretty farming/ranching area.  We decided to head on East and try to get home before Labor Day.  We’ll see….

We had to buy groceries tonight, so we unhooked the car and headed down I-90 to a Super Walmart.  Now, remember that we have been travelling in Alaska (where the whole state population is not worth writing home about), and also isolated areas of Canada where you don’t see a whole lot of traffic, or people, and then throw us into Metro Billings Montana in the middle of rush hour, and welcome to reality! To make it worse, there were at least ten thousand people shopping at Wally World…couldn’t wait to get out of there.

One of the good features of this KOA is that they have free WIFI, and even though we are at the far extreme of the Park, I am getting an excellent signal.  I’ve been leaving my WIFI card plugged in as we travel, and it’s amazing how many times it will pick up a signal from unknown sources.  I haven’t tried, but I imagine I could just log on and use their signal to access the internet…..would feel kind of guilty doing that, though.

Heading over to South Dakota tomorrow…hope to click off about 300 miles and spend the night in the well known town of Wall, South Dakota.  Never heard of it, well you must have heard of the Wall Drug Store?  Seems back in the 30’s, the owner of Wall Drugs was trying to come up with ideas to attract more business from the U.S. highway a few miles away.  He erected signs saying “free ice water at Wall Drugs”, and his business boomed.  Anyway, now the signs advertising Wall Drugs are scattered across the state, kind of like “South of the Border” in S.C., and the town is just one big Wall Drug, selling all kinds of Kitsch…It’s a place you only need to visit once!