Sunday, 21 Aug, Golf at Ronan, MT

Jennifer's alarm started going off at 4 am, she's a snoozer so it went off several times before she actually got up. But, she drove out of here at 4:55, so she did a good job of getting on the road on time.  Her plan was to drive all the way to Weiser, NV by 2pm, sleep for a couple hours and then drive on to Truckee.  She texted us later in the day and said she had changed her route and she was doing fine.  At 8 pm she texted that she made it to Jackpot, NV and had taken a nap.  She still had about 5 hours of driving at that point.
Meanwhile, we did our morning coffee thing and then headed south to Ronan to play golf at Mission Mountain Golf Course.
Our Tee Time was 12:15.  We only got there at noon, so didn't have any time to warm up.  Rob always likes to go hit a bucket and spend a little time practicing his putting before going out.  Me....I get way more practice on the course than necessary, no sense in tiring myself out before hand (I usually exhausted by 15) or for wasting the good shots on the driving range.
The course itself was not especially pretty.  It wasn't super green like many of the others, but the area was pretty.

Mountains on one side.

Ranchy Prairie land on the other.

Pretty wild flowers,

And a pond or two.  

We thought this was a mission off in the distance, hence the name, Mission Mountain Golf Course.

However......

The mission turned out to be some sort of agriculture something or other and the mountains in the background are in fact the Mission Mountain Range.

Aren't we just so silly!!!!

I played pretty well on the front 9, I got 3 pars in a row with each of them being a 1 putt.  I was feeling pretty proud of myself.  But, of course, it all fell apart, but with my handicap I ended up just 1 over par.  Rob did much better and in fact was 6 under.

We drove back to town and were very disappointed to find the lake valley filled with smoke.  

So, here we are.  The lake right in the middle of this map is our Flathead Lake.  Kalispell is 6 miles north of us and Whitefish is 21 miles. To the left of our lake, in yellow, is the Chippy Creek fire.  While we were playing golf (to the south of the lake in Ronan) the Chippy Creek fire blew up from 500 acres to 3800 acres.  Also to the left of it, is Thompson Falls and that little fire blew up.  In addition to those two, there are two fires around Spokane that started up today.  The wind is blowing our way and it has filled our valley up with smoke to the point where we cannot see across Flathead Lake.  It's horrible

We got home, closed up all the windows, turned on the AC and watched the closing ceremony of the olympics before going to bed.