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DAY 22 – Sunday, April 4   (Daylight Savings Time Ends)
START: Sandpoint, ID
END: White Sulphur Springs, MT
MILEAGE: 490 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Kootenai Falls, Montana

On my road trip back in 2000, the one that took me out of Los Angeles forever, there was a span of about four hours where I legitimately had no idea what time it was.  You see, it was the Sunday in October when daylight savings time caused us to “fall back”, so I gained an hour.  But then I crossed into Mountain Time Zone in Arizona and lost that hour.  But then I realized that Arizona didn’t actually participate in the whole daylight savings thing and I wasn’t sure if this time change was the one that knocked Arizona off from the rest of the country or put it back on track.  I didn’t know if I was losing an additional hour, gaining one back, or staying the same.  This was still a year or two before every single American of moderate means had a cell phone, which receives the precise date and time from strategically placed satellites in outer space, so all I had to go by was the clock on my radio, which I knew to be perpetually six minutes off to begin with.  It might have said five-thirty, but for all I knew the real time could have been anywhere from three o’clock to tomorrow morning.  Running through the possible scenarios in my head, I thought, “Okay, I went backwards one hour in Pacific, but then I gained that back as soon as I crossed into Mountain, but if this is the time of year that Arizona ignores everybody else in the country then didn’t I gain back another hour, or did the one I just lost in Pacific… wait no, if I… okay, if I don’t think about the ‘falling back’ thing, and I only lost an hour when I crossed into Mountain, then that’s… oh no but Arizona didn’t lose that one either… crap, start over…”  With no inductive reasoning skills to speak of, I finally just said, “Screw it,” and opted to drive in a time warp until I hit New Mexico.   

It wasn’t quite that bad this morning, though there’s nothing like losing an entire two hours before lunch to really put a damper on the rest of your day.  And between “springing ahead” an hour for daylight savings and then crossing the Montana border into Mountain Time Zone, we ended up doing just that.  Still, it wasn’t anything a little espresso couldn’t fix.  So before losing our second hour in thirty minutes, Lauren and I picked up a couple of lattes in Bonners Ferry at a place called J & C Pet Supply… Yeah, we thought that was weird too, especially after we went inside and realized the moniker was an accurate description of the establishment and not just some cutesy little name the owners tried to tack onto their restaurant.  One side of the store had both counter and sit-down food service, which catered heavily to the high school next door, while the other side sold giant bags of dog food, wood shavings for rabbit cages, fish tank supplies and other such things.  Still, you couldn’t argue with the beans, which were high quality, and we ordered up two iced mocha lattes to go.  I even added an extra shot to mine, knowing we had quite a bit of time to make up.

It wasn’t just the time change – or the fact that we’d thought it was Friday all day yesterday.  I’d told my friend Sam that we would meet up with her and her boyfriend on Thursday at their home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and after doing some calculations in the hotel, it became apparent that we were going to have to average about five hundred miles a day (that’s two hundred more than we’d been averaging) to make that goal.  Hand in hand with that knowledge came the realization that almost every point of interest we’d had planned for our return trip – ghost towns in Montana, lighthouses around the Great Lakes, a museum for “questionable medical devices” in Minnesota, a giant pile of cans in North Dakota – would have to be put off for another trip.  We narrowed our list down to a few very select “must see” stops and nixed everything else that wasn’t along those routes.

That’s the only way we were able to justify pulling off U.S. Route 2 thirty minutes into Montana, in the town of Libby, to take a short hike down to Kootenai Falls.  Sure this was a place of rare natural beauty, more or less off the beaten path (I think most everyone who’s been to Montana would agree that pretty much everything in that sparsely populated state can be considered “off the beaten path”), involving a river rushing through a deep mountain valley and over a set of falls.  And sure there was also a swinging bridge suspended fifty feet high across the gorge adding a healthy dose of vertigo and excitement to the scenery.  We stopped for all those reasons.  But mostly, it’s just that this place was already on our way.

But hey, thank God for that, because Kootenai (said: KOOT-nee) Falls is about as beautiful a place as you’ll find along any major road.  And what’s even better, it doesn’t have the look of a place that has been ruined by that very proximity.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, any prominence, scenic view, or otherwise tranquil spot of beauty located less than a quarter mile from a main road or parking lot is inherently doomed to ruination because of all the car-happy interstate tourists that will inevitably flood the area, bringing with them their usual cacophony of disrespect.  I’m not exactly sure how or why Kootenai Falls has been spared this particular fate.  My gut reaction would be to say that Route 2 – the most northern direct route across the country – is too far removed from any major points of interest for all but the most committed road trippers to even bother with.  But in fact, a hundred or so miles east of Libby, Route 2 passes along the border of Glacier National Park, home of arguably the most scenic drive on the planet, Going to the Sun Road. 

Then again, I suppose interstate tourists would want to minimize their driving time across Montana’s notoriously long and monotonous roads, so the majority of Glacier’s visitors probably fly into Missoula or Great Falls then take the relatively short jaunt up to the national park, missing Libby and Kootenai Falls by a hundred miles or more.  And the few that do opt for driving in via Route 2 probably get deflected by the fact that the local park service was forward thinking enough not to post a big bold sign announcing WATERFALLS RIGHT HERE.  A generic metal sign with the words “Historical Marker” is the only indication that there is anything of interest to be found here in Libby.  And as even the least road savvy travelers among us know, “Historical Marker” is usually just a euphemism for “Place where something happened a hundred years ago that wasn’t even interesting to the people who lived here at the time, but now the local chamber of commerce is hoping you’ll stop here and look around just long enough to realize that maybe you’re hungry and will decide to grab a burger and a soda at the one local diner in town.” 

Whatever the reason (be it the route or the marketing), the trail down to the Kootenai River was empty save for a family of four who just happened to arrive thirty seconds before us and the entire area was free of the telltale signs of overuse: litter, graffiti, beaten down patches of turf from too many jackasses walking off trail.  From the road, the trail weaves a quarter-mile through the woods, crossing a footbridge over a set of railroad tracks along the way.  The tracks, silent and empty at this time of day, appeared from around a bend in the valley and then disappeared around a bend on the other side.  As close as we were to the main road it really felt like we were in some remote and forbidding valley – the kind of place fanatical ex-military militiamen hide out and plot their revolution.  And seeing these empty tracks, coming from the middle of nowhere on their way, apparently, to another place equally in the middle of nowhere, filled my head with all sorts of foreboding thoughts involving secret government trains, screaming along the tracks in the dead of night, lights off, armed to the teeth and transporting the latest top secret weapon from one mountain bunker to the next.  With goose bumps breaking across my arms we continued down the trail.  Once at the river, the trail split, the right fork going upstream to the falls themselves and the left fork going a couple hundred feet down to the swinging bridge.  We took the latter path, following the family ahead of us, knowing we could probably get them to take our picture by the river.  We were seriously lacking on pictures of the two of us this trip.   

Over two hundred feet long, made of rope, netting and wooden planks and suspended between two cliffs with a noticeable dip in the middle, the bridge over the Kootenai River looks rickety and dangerous as hell.  A sign announcing a limit of five persons at a time only serves to heighten one’s unease.  I imagine the last thing most people say before climbing the steps onto the bridge is essentially the same thing Lauren said to me: “Are you sure this thing is safe?”

Out over the river, Lauren and I could feel the bridge moving underneath us.  And the closer we got to the middle, the more pronounced that motion became.  The bridge didn’t swing side-to-side the way its name indicated, but it certainly bounced up and down.  I had expected to feel the bridge shiver and shake with every step we took.  But the durability and sheer length of the thing simply absorbed and redistributed the force of our movements, producing no instantly noticeable effects.  This was perhaps more unnerving than all, especially as we got closer to the middle, farther from the safety of solid ground.  Several times, Lauren and I felt the bridge lurch upwards for no apparent reason.  It didn’t knock us off balance or anything, but it was enough to make us stop short, white-knuckle the rope railing and ask one another, “Did you feel that?”

We got over our skittishness by just assuring ourselves that we were certainly not the first tourists to walk over this bridge and if there really was a flaw in its design, it wouldn’t be here anymore.  In this day and age of multi-million-dollar lawsuits over splinters and coffee burns, if the park service or the town of Libby had had the slightest inclination that the bridge was unsound, they would have blocked it off or dismantled it post haste.  Emboldened a little by that thought, Lauren and I stopped in the middle of the bridge, where the most pronounced movement was occurring, and looked over the side. 

It doesn’t look like much on the map, but from this vantage point, the Kootenai River was not an inconsiderable force.  Although most of the white water only occurred at the falls themselves several hundred feet upstream, the sheer volume of green water coursing by fifty feet below us was both humbling and intimidating.  Even on the calmer edges of the river where you could glimpse below the water’s surface it was still too deep to see the bottom.  Occasionally a piece of wood riding the current would fairly shoot by underneath, reeling and tumbling in the river’s churn the entire way.  I’m not a good judge of water speeds, but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to realize what would happen if one of us fell into that surge. 

The only thing more nerve wracking than standing on a bridge fifty feet above this river would have been, I think, to be standing on a bridge just few feet above its surface. When the Civilian Conservation Corps, working under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, erected the first swinging bridge over the Kootenai River in the 1930’s they made that very mistake.  Unknown to Lauren and I at the time, a dam was erected thirty miles upstream in 1975, slowing down the torrent of the river.  Back when the CCC guys built their bridge, there was no such impedance.  The river roared through this gorge with more might and fury than I can even imagine – with the bridge builders standing only a few yards above it.  Well it wasn’t long before heavy snowmelt made the Kootenai rage with all its might, ultimately washing the original bridge away in 1948.  It has since been rebuilt twice; once right after the flood putting it a little bit higher, and once more in the 1980’s when they hoisted it up to its current apex.

Lauren and I made it to the other side, unscathed and only slightly rattled.  We caught up with the family ahead of us and exchanged cameras for pictures of our respective clans, using the rapids of the falls as our backdrops.  The family continued on down the trail and as much as we would have liked to follow, time was evermore a-wastin’.  I sent Lauren back onto the bridge with one of the cameras and we exchanged up and down photos of each other.  I got a few of her perched high on the swinging bridge over the bright green river, with distinct alternating layers of prehistoric sediment making up the mountain behind her.  She, in turn, took several of me going for the macho-rugged look, standing on the edge of the cliff above the river.  I stood close enough to the edge that some very bad things would have happened if I passed out from vertigo, but I was disappointed when I saw the pictures later.  As thrill-seeking and dangerous a look as I had been going for, it still looked as though I had put a safe and reasonable half-body-length between myself and the yawning abyss.  Pussy. 

We crossed back over the bridge and made our way up to Kootenai Falls.  They were beautiful of course, though they would have been far more impressive if we hadn’t come down here expecting to see the quintessential image of water plummeting over a cliff a hundred feet up.  Lauren and I had hiked to some pretty serious waterfalls during our honeymoon in Hawaii, so we had rather high standards.  Kootenai Falls isn’t represented by one sudden loss of elevation so much as a series of descending steps that produce a loud and powerful set of rapids.  So powerful in fact that several scenes from the 1994 Meryl Streep / Kevin Bacon film, The River Wild were shot here. 

Even still, this was one of the most beautiful places we’d seen all trip – which is really saying something.  The falls has long been a sacred site for the Kootenai Indians, a place where members of the tribe would, and still do, come for visions, meditation and communion with spiritual forces.  And if we’d had more time, I agree that this would have been a kickass place to meditate and commune.  But we were on a race across the country now, and every hour counted.

So we drove.  Up through the mountains and further into the middle of nowhere.  Here and there, across wide gaping gorges, we could see what looked like giant non-descript bunkers built right into the mountains.  There didn’t appear to be any roads going to or from them, just a set of railroad tracks.  The bunkers seemed much too primitive and formidable to be merely loading docks for mining operations.  I felt goosebumps break across my arms again, trying to imagine what could possibly be contained behind those heavy steel doors.  Weapons?  Chemicals?  N.O.R.A.D.?  Surely something the government doesn’t want us knowing about.  But with nobody around to ask, Lauren and I could only keep formulating our own conspiracy theories as we continued on and around the perimeter of Glacier National Park.  Going to the Sun Road is generally closed from October through early June because snow accumulation and the threat of avalanche-inducing blizzards is too great all other times of the year, so we didn’t get the chance to use up more time checking out its supposedly noteworthy scenery. 

We meandered our way along the gorge cut by the Flathead River, spotting several indigenous mountain goats along the way.  Those little buggers are truly amazing creatures.  You often see them perched on high cliffs that no four-legged mammal has any business being at the top of.  After all, the only possible way they could have gotten up there is to have climbed.  In fact, that’s exactly what they do.  Equipped with actual claws on the backs of their hooves, mountain goats can climb slopes with a pitch of sixty degrees or more!  This gets them well above all the usual predators including bears, wolves and cougars. 

But again, we didn’t have time to sit and watch them.  We crossed the Continental Divide at Marias Pass just before three o’clock.  At a mere 5216 feet, this was nothing like the drama we’d experienced going west over the divide in Colorado.  The pass was wide and straight, the grade nothing the Mazda couldn’t handle.  There was even a decent sized rest area at the top, which Lauren especially was grateful for.  Plus, we’d both had quite our share of near misses involving steep cliffs and narrow roads for one trip. I even managed to find a Montana shotglass at the gift shop.

As soon as we got down the other side, and I mean the very instant we got to the bottom of the mountain, we were officially on the Great Plains.  It’s amazing how fast this happens all up and down the Rockies.  It’s flat prairie for as far as the eye can see until all of a sudden, WHAM, a mountain range shoots up in front of you.  Going east in Montana it’s quite the opposite feeling.  One minute you’re surrounded by giant peaks of igneous rock, speckled with snow, pine and camouflaged snipers, and the next, you’re out on the prairie, flat and brown and stretching to the horizon. 

This is what they call Big Sky Country and it’s what Montana is famous for.  If you don’t believe me, just look around.  But not at the horizon.  Take a look at the names of businesses in any of the small towns you pass through.  Big Sky Auto Repair, Big Sky Life Insurance, Big Sky Liquid Fertilizer, Big Sky Skylights.  From the very first time I put rubber to asphalt to cross this great country, I always knew I wanted to come to Montana and see just how big that sky really was.  I just couldn’t understand what would possibly make Montana’s sky look so much bigger than anywhere else in the country.  Was it the pristine air quality?  Something to do with the elevation?  I had a somewhat misguided notion that all of Montana looked like what we’d just driven through; primarily peaks, glaciers and mountain goats.  I had no idea that the eastern three-quarters of the state is considered plains.  Now that we were clear of the Rockies, I understood.  It’s out here where large flat swaths of land, free of trees, hills and buildings create that illusion of a big sky.  Without anything obstructing its impossibly wide dome, that big blue yonder is able stretch all the way out to its maximum potential.

So yes, it was big.  But frankly, I thought the sky in Kansas, with all those same prerequisites, was equally big.  To be quite honest, after driving through that state, I was expecting something utterly surreal and almost supernatural out of Montana’s sky.  After all, if it was going to claim the title of “Big Sky Country”, it had to be something far more impressive than anything Kansas could conjure up.  But actually, no.  Kansas could just as easily have applied for, and won, the title as well.  My assumption is that Kansas already had other things going for it: wheat, tornadoes, The Wizard of Oz.  Montana really wasn’t known for much else other than its sky, and Kansas, being the gracious little state that it was, didn’t want to take away what little tourism Montana might be able to drum up with its dubious moniker.  So they let Montana claim the title for itself and nobody was the wiser.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not bagging on Montana or their sky.  I’m just saying that if one really wanted to make a stink, the title could have been shared between the two states – and probably between any or all of the states located along the Great Plains for that matter.  But for beautiful wide-open nothingness, Montana matched Kansas mile for mile and we both loved it.  I personally never tired of taking pictures of endless fields that disappeared into nowhere or long stretches of road that went and went until they were mere pinpricks on the horizon.  This was Backroad, America and this was what this road trip was all about.

For years before the federal government enacted a national speed limit in 1974, Montana had no official maximum speed.  Of course you had to slow down whenever driving through towns and populated areas, but on the rural highways, “Reasonable and Prudent” were the magic words of the time.  But Lord knows you can’t give Americans a rule that vague and not expect them to take idiotic advantage of it.  When responsibility for speed control returned to the states in 1996, “Reasonable and Prudent” returned to Montana and speed demons from all around the nation took great joy in bringing their Ferraris up to Big Sky country and racing them as fast as they could down those straight and endless roads.  When they got pulled over, they would simply shrug their shoulders and say, “I thought a hundred and fifty was perfectly reasonable.”  It wasn’t long before Montana residents and the Supreme Court raised a stink, and a hard cap of seventy-five miles per hour was put on all major highways (seventy for rural roads). 

As you drive across Montana, it’s obvious the “Reasonable and Prudent” mentality hasn’t quite left the collective bloodstream.  Everything on the plains is so spread out that you have to go fast just to get anywhere.  The roads are so long and straight and unchanging that, without cruise control, you’re bound to find your speedometer creeping often into the eighties and above.  Even with cruise control, seventy miles-per-hour begins to feel painfully slow after awhile.  Imagine what it must have been like between 1974 and 1996 when it was illegal to go even a single mile over fifty-five.  You rarely see cops on the long stretches between towns, and the ones you do see are blasting by going ninety or more.  There aren’t even that many signs reminding you how fast you’re allowed to go.  We generally saw one speed limit sign after leaving a town (which was really just there to tell us it was okay to rev up our speed) and then that was it for the road’s duration until we hit the next town, which was often a good fifty miles away.  No reminder signs strategically posted along the way.  None of those giant unmanned radar detectors you usually see parked along interstates and in residential areas notifying motorists of their current speed.  The state makes a small token effort of letting you know how fast you’re technically allowed to go, but then they pretty much leave you to your own reasonable prudence after that.

To be honest, I kind of wish they would have given us a bit more official guidance in the way of signs.  There were several places along these roads where it would have been far more reasonable and prudent for us to slow the hell down.  We’d be flying along at eighty-fi… at the posted speed limit of seventy miles per hour, getting hypnotized by the beautiful but monotonous landscape, when all of a sudden the road would turn sharply to the left then back again to the right without any official state warning.  Oh sure, they put a couple of those yellow arrow markers right at the curve as if to say, “Hey the road bends rather severely here, but you already knew that.”  By that point we were already careening around the hairpin turn, tires squealing, kicking up gravel and hugging a ditch that could have seriously altered the outcome of our vacation.  In places like these, a sign that at least suggested we slow down to a more manageable twenty-five would have been a welcome sight.  

Rather than bothering with sign after sign full of even more rules and numbers that drivers probably wouldn’t pay attention to anyway, Montana has opted for a far more subtle (or hideously less subtle, depending on your point of view) reminder for all wannabe racers to watch their speed.  Crosses.  Infrequently-placed crosses marking the sites of fatal car accidents.  Unlike the ornately decorated shrines and descansos you tend to see along roadways elsewhere in the country, these crosses are plain, stark and non-descript.  It’s not grieving families, but the American Legion who puts them in place.  And they’re not there to memorialize the dead, but to warn the living.  Each cross is about four inches tall, painted white and perched at eye level atop a thin red stick.  They have no lettering and no markings.  They don’t need to.  The message is all too clear: “Hey jackass, slow the hell down or this is all you’ll leave behind!” 

While most of the markers consisted of individual crosses, many sites were marked by several.  One particular marker, indicating one hell of a pileup, had a whopping nine crosses!  Many of the crosses we saw were posted along sharp curves and next to steep drop-offs and bodies of water, making it very easy to picture what some motorists’ final seconds of life must have entailed.  I don’t know if there is any statistical way to prove the effectiveness of the American Legion’s highway cross program, which has been in place since 1954, but I can only imagine it has made far more people slow down than mere a speed limit sign ever could.  It is perplexing though that the program even remains active in this day and age where all official references to God are one-by-one being removed from every public venue.  Personally I think it would be a travesty if the ACLU, or some other rabblerousing organization, managed to get in there and convince the state to take down the white crosses from its highways.  Then again, if that happened, we’d probably get our official statistics on the program’s effectiveness.  I’d be willing to bet big money that the number of accidents would rise dramatically in the year or two after the white cross program was officially scrapped. 

For our part, Lauren and I heeded the crosses’ implied warnings and remained Reasonable and Prudent.  Barring a couple of hair-raising moments involving unexpected curves, we were never in danger of being added to the American Legion’s To Do list. 

Night fell and a nearly full moon rose, bathing distant farming clusters in a spooky blue hue that made it seem as though we could have been driving through the western frontier as much as a settled America of the new millennium.  Somewhere south of Great Falls we’d passed from wide-open plains into thick forest.  The road started to bend and curve more as it meandered down and around somewhat steep and rugged hills and the Mazda’s feeble headlights just couldn’t seem to illuminate enough of our path to make me feel completely safe anticipating turns.  I was thankful for the full moon, which helped light our way a little better. 

The book ROAD TRIP USA had given all readers a strict warning to never bypass a gas station in Montana on less than a quarter tank.  We had obeyed this rule implicitly all day, but the later it got, the more vacant the towns became, and the fewer options we found ourselves with.  Every gas station in every blink-and-you-missed-it town we passed was empty, lights out, closed ‘til morning – provided it hadn’t been abandoned and boarded up long before we came along.  Our most likely point of refuge appeared to be White Sulphur Springs, a crossroads town located at the junction of U.S. 12 and 89.  At the very least, we knew there was a Super 8 in town, which would allow us to spend the night and gas up in the morning when everything opened.

Somewhere half-way between White Sulphur Springs and the previous no name town without an open gas station, we came around a sharp bend at the bottom of a small mountain and stopped short at something we hadn’t seen or expected all day long: a line of brake lights.  It was a short line to be certain, but one just doesn’t expect traffic to ever back up on roads like this.  We stopped the Mazda behind the last car in line, got out and ascertained that there had been an accident a few hundred feet up.  Nothing major it appeared.  A pickup truck had gone off the road and into the ditch.  In fact, the accident itself wasn’t blocking the road at all, but the police were still holding traffic back, allowing the tow truck to come in and pull the pickup out.  So we sat and waited with a couple dozen other cars for about a half-hour, hazard lights flashing and engine turned off.  We had plenty of gas to get us all the way to White Sulphur Springs, but no sense wasting any. 

When at last the pickup was pulled free and traffic was waved through, we followed a rather large SUV through what was fast becoming a deep, narrow and pitch-black valley – the moon now obscured by mountains.  The SUV’s hazards were still blinking and at one point it slowed down to a crawl and eased over to the right-hand side of the road.  Assuming they were pulling over, I moved into the left lane and drove around.  As I passed by I heard an irate woman yell something that ended with the word, “Asshole!”  A second later, the big car turned left down a dirt road.  The SUV’s blinking hazards had concealed the fact that the driver had apparently put on her left blinker.  Combined with the fact that she had been moving over to the right, it’s easy to see how I misread her intentions and passed into her intended direction of travel.  Earlier, as we had been waiting for the tow truck to do its job, this same SUV had started backing up without warning and stopped bare inches from our front bumper only after I laid on the horn.  We were obviously not dealing with the most astute driver in Montana here.  But now as the SUV’s headlights disappeared down the dirt road, I shook my head and cursed, because even though the lady driver had been completely in the wrong on both accounts, I knew none of that mattered.  Ever marked by that bright yellow license plate, I had once again become the jackass from New Jersey. 

We hit White Sulphur Springs a half-hour later and filled up at an open gas station that was impressively large by the Montana standards we’d see thus far.  We’d driven about 490 miles today; ten short of our aim, but we didn’t feel confident about finding another town with a motel or open gas station any farther along.  So we secured a room at the Spa Hot Springs Motel, and noticed two things immediately.  The first being the distinct smell of egg farts in the air, originating from the supposedly therapeutic sulphur springs from which the town gets its name.  The second thing we noticed was that the Spa Hot Springs Motel, unlike every other motel we’d stayed at thus far, actually gives you what you ask for in a room.  I’d told the clerk I needed a room for one person, and by god, the solitary bed in that room was designed with one and only one person in mind.  Larger than a twin, but smaller than a double, it was obviously going to be a cramped night for the two of us on this bed. 

After checking in, we walked across the street to a place called the Mint Bar to grab some dinner.  You know those movie scenes where the protagonists walk into a diner in some piss-ant little town and all the local patrons literally stop what they’re doing to look at them?  You know how you always thought that was just some clichéd and overused story-telling device that doesn’t actually happen in real life?  Well, I’m here to tell you firsthand that it does.  As soon as Lauren and I stepped inside the Mint Bar, all eyes were on us.  None of the conversations stopped, and the needle didn’t scratch off the jukebox or anything, but in the amount of time it took for us to walk through the door we had become the center of attention.  It’s possible that this same thing happens whenever locals walk in here too – and the collective interest certainly wore off by the time we stepped up to the bar and asked for a menu – but that uneasy oh-my-god-they’re-all-going-to-kill-us seed had already been planted and we asked for our burgers and fries to go, opting to eat off our laps on our tiny bed.

ONTO DAY 23