Kalispell

Howdy !

Heard on CNN yesterday evening : a guy has just won a bit more than 280,000,000 $ at the lottery (the 10th higher amount ever), and when he was asked what he had planned to do with his money, he answered "pay my bills, have my 2 front teeth replaced, and go to Disneyworld with my wife". Either he has an incredible amount of bills, or he will have to find a few more ideas, if he wants to spend his money...

Seen on the airport "Departures" screens in the part of the SLC airport which is dedicated to domestic flights on small planes: the following list of (absolutely non touristic) destination airports, that I would not be able to locate on a map
- Fresno
- Casper
- Butte
- Lewiston
- Pocatello
- Eugene
- Bozeman
- Boise
Guess what ? I was the only non-US passenger in the terminal, and the US passengers would probably have been surprised to learn that there was an alien among them.

Heard in the plane from Salt Lake City to Kalispell :
- apologies from a member of the crew, because the 20 minutes delay was due to the fact that she had misread the clock at home, and thought that it was 8pm, whereas it was already 9pm, which means that she should already have been at the airport "I asked a friend to drive me to the airport, and to drive at 80 miles per hour, while I changed clothes on the rear seat".
- question from the flight attendant just before closing the door : "Hello guys, this flight is going to Kalispell, are all of you planning to go there ? Yes ? Oki doki, let's move on !"

Seen at the rear of Randy's truck, when he picked me up this morning in Kalispell : a frozen wolf. Seriously. They had to shoot it last week, kept it in the freezer, and brought it today to a taxidermist in order to be able to keep it. OK, to be completely honest, the wolf was in a plastic bag, and what I saw was merely a bag, not the wolf itself, but anyway there was a frozen wolf in the truck! As Randy said : "Only in Americana" ;)

The saying of the day (from Randy) : "You never have too many chicken wings". This might explain why we have just bought 30 pounds of them...

Welcome back to Montana !

Kalispell

Hi guys !

The fortune cookie I had after lunch said "Now it is time to call loved ones at a distance. Share your news". I won't call you, but at least I can share the news.

21 hours after leaving Paris (thank you United Airlines for the standard cancellations and delays...), here I am, back in Kalispell.

For those of you who would not know where it is, it is in Montana, up there close to the Canadian border. But you would not be the only one to ignore where it is : the United Airlines employee who checked me in in Paris looked at me in a weird way when I answered Kalispell to the question "which is your final destination ?". Something like "poor girl, she does not even know the name of the airport she is flying to, this does not exist...". Yes it does, madam !
Same surprise in the flight between Chicago and Denver, when the crew announced the gates for the connections. People made a weird face when she announced "Kalispell, gate 93". A mix of "where on earth is that ?" and of "I didn't know that there was a gate 93 in this airport". Yes, there is a gate 93, the tiny one hidden at the end of the small corridor.

And there you get the feeling that you are getting close to the objective : in the airport in Denver, people start wearing cowboys hats, and the plane to Kalispell is the smallest one ever seen (I can hardly stand in it) with only a dozen of pieces of luggage checked in. But after 2 hours of flight, you understand why there were only a dozen of them : half of the luggage is missing, including mine. That will end with a free delivery at the hotel on the following day. They are lucky that I had planned to spend a whole day in town before going to the ranch, they would not have appreciated the 2 hours of drive from the airport to the ranch...

Gosh it is good to be back here : the taxi driver waving at me in the airport and shouting "Hey Marie, I am here !", the girl at the hotel reception welcoming me with a friendy "Hi Marie, how was your flight from Paris ?"... I haven't been here for 6 months, and I don't even need to give my name to anybody, everything sounds as if I had left a couple of days ago. It almost feels like I am back home...

This morning, it is 5°C outside, alternate spitting and sunshine, a standard Montana autumn, a couple of shops / restaurants have disappeared since last time, but as long as Murdoch's, Walmart, my favorite second hand bookshop and the mud pie at the restaurant around the corner are still there, everything's fine.

Something else has not changed : I am still the only pedestrian in town, people would probably be less surprised to see a camel or an elephant walking on the sidewalk than to see this strange human alien who is walking in the town. The advantage is that the pedestrian is treated and protected as any species threatened by extinction : all the cars start slowing down as soon as they see you, even if they are 50 meters away, wherever you are, just in case you might want to cross. One day, someone might make a picture of me walking in a small town in USA, and it won't surprise me...