Day 4 : Missoula – Bellingham

Missoula is really pretty – the town is surrounded by mountains and hills, so wherever you look on the horizon you can see them.

Missoula also has an elite firefighters base. These brave men and women are called smokejumpers.

They deal with those scary wildfires that happen out on this side of the continent. But what makes them different is that they parachute into the fire! I’d be too scared to try that. There were a lot of things that related to fires here, including a fire fighting history museum and a fire sciences research facility! Will and I agreed it would be nice to live here. Dew Drop said if she wasn’t scared of heights she would want to be a smoke jumper. I was pretty sad to leave Missoula. But the scenery on the way to Bellingham is so pretty, I didn’t mind it too much.

We grabbed some breakfast at McDonalds, and Dew Drop learned that there is a difference between a sausage mcmuffin and a sausage mcmuffin with egg!

Today we crossed into Idaho from Montana (they have so many different types of license plates in Montana!), and then into Washington.

These are just a few of the ones we saw!

Right as we were leaving Missoula, we saw another train! This time it wasn’t carrying coal, and Dew Drop wasn’t sure what was in it. So we took a picture to ask her dad later. He’s a mechanical engineer. He also went to the University of Western Ontario! He says not much has changed from those days.

We passed through Idaho (Dew Drop and I were sleeping the whole time, though!), that only took us half an hour. On the drive through Washington, I saw some deer eating grass at the side of the road! It was really cool. There were also some mini waterfalls falling down the rocks on the side of the road.

It took us a while to drive to Seattle… and we managed to get there right at rush hour. It took us an extra hour to get passed the city!

Turns out that this morning, the Team Captain noticed there was brake fluid on the bottom of the baja car.

It took the paint right off!

That’s a big problem, because that stuff is what makes the car stop! I’ll explain how brakes work.
Have you ever seen how bicycle brakes work? Maybe your mom or dad can show you. See the black rubber thing in the picture? That's a brake pad.

They squeeze together on the wheel to stop it from moving. The same thing happens in a car. When you push the brake pedal, the brake fluid is what pushes the brake pads (the pads on cars are a little different looking than bicycle ones). So if the brake fluid isn’t in the brakes, then you can’t stop!