Exposed For The Shadows

First, it was 1,310 miles. In one day. We left Minneapolis at 3:45 a.m. Central Time and arrived in Columbia Falls at 11:30 p.m. Mountain Time. The last 100 miles was through small towns on a 2-lane road around a beautiful lake. Of course it got dark while we were on that road, not helping with making good time.

Note to self: Don’t do any more 1,300 mile days of driving.

Before that last stretch it was high speed driving on the super slabs of I-94 and I-90. It was while going along I-90 at about 85 mph that I saw a deer cross the road in front of me. Knowing that there is always at least one more deer, I stepped on the brake and looked for the second deer. It was there, and despite my best efforts it managed to encounter the front of my truck. Fortunately I had slowed down quite a bit by then, so it was more of a bump than a collision. Very little damage to my truck. I’m not sure about the deer. She wasn’t to be found after I stopped to check for damage.

The center of the truck’s “grill” met up with the hind quarter of the deer. That so called grill is thin cheap plastic. It has a bunch of cracks in it now, though from a distance you can’t really tell anything happened. The force of the impact was absorbed by the hood latch mechanism behind that grill. It’s bent and as a result I can’t get the hood open now. I decided not to try too hard for fear that I’ll get it unlatched and it won’t latch again…a much more serious problem in the middle of a trip. The truck doesn’t use any oil, so I just don’t plan to open the hood until I get home and figure out how I’m going to fix this.

While fooling around with the grill I did manage to get a cut on my hand from the sharp pieces of broken plastic, so now I’m probably going to get some weird disease from the deer and she will have her revenge on me.

Another minor event yesterday was courtesy of my credit card company. They decided that 4 tanks of gas in a 12-hour period was suspicious usage and turned my card off. Fortunately I had a second card for the last two fill-ups, and the check-in at the condo. I got on the phone this morning and fixed that little issue.

Today I’m fried. I expected that, so I planned nothing for today. I’m relaxing in the condo and sometime in the afternoon I’ll go drive around and check out the ranger stations for both Glacier National Park and the Forest Service. The weather forecast is calling for highs in the 80s most of the coming week, so it’s looking like we are in luck and Gaea and Brooke won’t be too terribly frozen by the time we leave.

Oh…and there is no wifi in the condo. We have to go to another building to get a signal. So updates will depend on time and inclination to make that trudge to check e-mail and upload blog posts. But I’m sure I’ll be posting now and then throughout the week.

That photo up there is LuxxxNoir from our shoot in Chicago last month. We were just playing around with the light from the motel window and her magnificent, beautiful hair. Something a little different for me, but it seems to reflect my burned out state of being today. Thanks Luxxx.