Highway 89, Montana

I just had the best drive of my life.

It was on 89, through central Montana.

89 is a two-lane road that cuts down from near Glacier National Park through Great Falls and the Lewis and Clark National Forest to Livingston. It skirts the Rockies almost all the way. The speed limit is 70. It passes through a few towns, but very few.

So it is a long, straight, high-speed road that has the Rocky Mountains on one side and plains on the other, with very few other cars. There are other cars, of course--but because the road is mostly long and straight, in a treeless country, it's very easy to pass them. To blow past them doing 95, perhaps, because what cop would sit out there to catch speeders?

And oh, it was gorgeous. Truly the best drive of my life. Beautiful, easy, fast, and clear. The topography changed going through the Lewis and Clark National Forest, of course, but then it opened back up in mountains and plains. The only problem was the relative lack of bathrooms, and the lack of good places to pull over and take pictures. It's probably just as well--I would have been taking pictures every mile or so.

And on a beautiful clear, sunny, hot day--we played the music loud, drove fast, and exclaimed over the scenery.

Spectacular. Just spectacular.