Tour de Glacier + POTD

As promised, here are my photos from my weekend trip to Glacier National Park.  Enjoy, comment, vacation vicariously.

First stop: COFFEE.  When you leave at 5 in the morning, a little bit of espresso is in order.  Thankfully, Autumn is also a coffee drinking enthusiast, so I was not alone in mandating a stop.  Cafe au Laît with a healthy dump of cinnamon :)

While Clint purchases our park pass, Ellen, Autumn and I perused the general store.  At the register were a bunch of the buoy-like cubes attached to key-rings.  When we asked the cashier what the mini-buoys were for, he told us that they were key 'life preservers.'  Apparently the number 1 item reported lost in Glacier Park is people dropping their keys in the rivers/lakes.  It also happens that the number 1 cause of death in Glacier Park is also falling into a body of water (NOT bears as the scary literature leads one to believe).  Note to self:  avoid water in Glacier.

We entered from the West side of the park, so our first "attraction site" was McDonald Lake.

(Clint's shift on the camera...so, just us ladies)

 Eventually, we made it up into the trails and past all of the automobile tourists.  Very pretty and serene :)

We all loved this tree.  It looks like it has a giant nuclear tumor growing out of it.  To give perspective to the size: all four of us could stand right underneath the mushroom-like growth.

By about 4 in the afternoon we reached the far end of St. Mary Lake where it runs into the Black Feet Indian Reservation.  There were all took a giant PB & J snack break, stripped our hiking boots off to wade in the frigid water and sat down on the rocks to do some last minute school-work.  The never ending reading assignments are the bane of a college student’s life. Gah.

Plate of the Day (POTD):

It's amazing what dishes one comes up with when their fridge as a limited (and hodge-podge) inventory.  For breakfast I made a variation upon my crock-pot oatmeal...other than the ingredients were not your typical English porridge kind...

It is a mixture of leftover rice, oatmeal, nutritional yeast, tamari, chopped green onion, Italian parsley, handful of Shiitake mushrooms, couple heaping spoonfulls of toasted pumpkin seeds and the LAST BIT (rest in peace inside my tummy) of my dark-chocolate-quinoa bar.  Very strange, unexpectedly paired, but crazy delicious.  I may have to track down some of the ingredients again just to make "left-over-porridge" on purpose.

Cheers, kaite ;]