A Labor Day for us

I took advantage of a mostly cloudy and cool day here in Columbia Falls to wash about 1200 miles of grime off the bus-house exterior. We've done more than our normal amount of driving in the rain on this leg of the journey between the U.P. of Michigan and here... and wet roads just make a mess of everything. The poor old toad really gets blasted. Imagine, during a heavy rain, following a bus with your car about 5 feet behind. The big tires of the bus suck up tons of water and dirt from the road, fling it into the air, and blast it all back at the toad at 60 miles per hour. I don't like moving on rainy days for this reason alone.

Besides the usual road dust and mud, we had a little extra cleaning to do on the bus-house's front end. I often have to deal with your normal bug squishes, but we drove through a section of US-2 in Eastern Montana where the lowest 3 feet of the front end (what you might call the bumper area... if we actually had a real bumper... which we don't...) got pelted with grasshoppers. It sounded like we were getting hit by small arms fire, a constant staccato of small impacts of bug with bus. They apparently like sitting on the road during the heat of the day, and when a vehicle, especially a big vehicle, approaches, they do what they've evolved to do when threatened... they hop. They hop upward about 2 feet or so and if they've timed it just right, they reach the apex of their hop just as the big ol' bus-house smacks 'em at 60 miles per hour. The resulting carnage isn't pretty and takes a measure more elbow-grease to remove. It really bugged me!

That's what kept me occupied today. Yuck!

Dar helped out with my chore, but she also thought it only appropriate that she labor away on some laundry... seeing how it's Labor Day and all.

We're hoping for a little more sun tomorrow for another exploration into the Park.
T