Montana

9/29/23 – Friday:  Last night’s low was 39 degrees.  We have two little electric heaters that we set up and they did good at keeping us at a nice pleasant 65 degrees all night.  And we didn’t even have to use our propane!  We have really sketchy cell service here, so I’ve been writing this in “NOTES” without the pictures, so hopefully I insert the right pictures in the right places when I finally have a chance to copy this into the blog.

I couldn’t find any tour times for the cave tours, so we left camp at about 10:30 to go up to the visitor’s center and get the scoop.  

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9/27/23 Wednesday:  We did the final touches on putting Island Girl to bed for the winter.  It’s hard to leave her for SEVEN months!  But really I guess it’s only three, since we’ll be here for a few days around Christmas.  Then another four months before we’re back in the spring for another summer filled with land and sea adventures.  

Kenny checked all the systems while I checked all of the interior.  I like to make sure there is nothing touching the hull, like blankets, pillows or clothes than can get damp.  I set a fan to run on a timer for three hours every morning down in the bedroom to circulate air.  That is the lowest place where condensation would settle.  We set the three little built-in electric heaters as low as they’ll go, which says is 45 degrees.   I don’t know what temperature they really come on at, but our power bills from last winter weren’t bad at all, and nothing was damp when we returned to her.  We made the final loads of stuff out, locked her up, and said good-bye. 

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