Mi-zooooo-la

Next stop............Missoula, MT.

Campground was great.  Lots of shade trees, friendly staff, nice restrooms and laundry room.  They even had a concert one night, but we missed it.

Our spot for the week.  The flowers all over the park were beautiful.

Missoula is home to the University of Montana and quite a happening place.  I love all the activity that the city had going on.  It was a small, big city with every shopping and food option you could want, but had a nice vibe.

Clark Fork River that runs through town

Some towns have an aliveness to them and this was one of them.  There were baseball games, cool parks, river sports, bike paths, climbing walls, skate parks, cool hikes, farmers markets, and much more.

We started our week with something that was pretty unique to this area........The Smoke Jumpers Museum.



It turned out to be pretty cool and coincidentally after we had been exploring the museum for a while, a young girl said the tour would now begin.  She talked about all of the gear and took us into the facility where the jumpers work and train.  We watched them cutting/sewing their gear, packing their parachutes, and lots of interesting info about the field in general.  Fires are a big thing out here and the system that's in place to deal with them is pretty cool.

We did drive through the university and since it is summer break, things were pretty quiet.  Nice campus though.  After our campus tour we hit the park, but not just any park..............It's a wooden play castle called Dragon Park which is right next to the Carousel for Missoula.

Luna performing the skipper.

While there, Luna and I hiked Mount Sentinel and were quite impressed with ourselves.

The view of the University of Montana from Mount Sentinel.

It is a hike just to the east of the university campus and is pretty steep.  On top of the steepness, it was super hot and there was not one ounce of shade, but we made it.  Yahoo!

Luna sitting on the "M" of Mount Sentinel.

It was too hot for Sofia so she read in the air conditioning of a coffee shop.

The bike path through the city is very nice and crosses over the river in several places, passes many parks and is very scenic.  Luna and I packed our bikes on the roof of the truck and headed to town.

Luna posing with the "M" in the background.  She was sitting up there the day before :)

Paddle Board Yoga along the bike path.

We biked our little hearts out, stopping by the parks, dipping our toes in the river,

Luna, toe-dipping :)

and happened upon a climbing/ropes course offered by the city park system on Thursdays during the summer.  It was super cool.

Luna up at the top.

After finishing up there, we headed back to the truck and all of the booths were set up at the park for Downtown ToNight.  Booths with food/sweets and a great band was playing.

The temps were much cooler and Diego and Sofia showed up to join us.  We had some dinner and after telling Diego and Sofia about the ropes course we drove over to see if we could catch them before closing time.

Sofia on the swing bridge.

Diego heading up.

Since Sofia had not been joining us very much this week because of the heat, we decided to enjoy something in the water at the end of the week, so we went to Splash Montana.  I need to learn more about the state tax system in Montana, but the city's park service is pretty amazing and also there is no sales tax.  I'm guessing they make up for it somewhere, but as a visitor it was quite nice.  Besides the ropes course we enjoyed they have two water parks that are pretty impressive.  One indoors and the other outdoors.  They have lazy rivers, water slides, tubes, zero entry area with splash buckets...The whole works.  The entrance for all three of us was about $15 I think.

Great way to spend a day and the girls had a blast.  I found a shade tree and caught up on some reading and family phone calls.

Saturday was farmer market heaven.  Three different markets along the main drag of town.  We did what our good friends in Philly call "Waa Waa, Eee, Eee"........meaning walk, walk, eat, eat :) Beautiful music and people everywhere enjoying their Saturday.

Saturday market #1

Yummy Montana cherries.

Beautiful music at the Saturday markets.

I really enjoyed this town.  The only factor we didn't love was that there were casinos, so in some instances the people that frequented the casinos were a bit of rough crowd, but it was very minimal and I thought it was a great place.  I would put it on my short list of favorites.