Kintla Lake at Glacier National & the NyQuil Overdose in the WhiteFish Med Center Parking Lot - 07.24.21
This was the destination and turn around point for my Montana adventure loop… but I had left Denver with a brutal head cold after attending a huge Venezuelan support party the night before and at the time, I was quite convinced I would walk out of there with Covid… nope… just a head cold. If you know the Latin community… there’s zero personal space. No complaints… but… Anywho, the cold hit hard and although I continued on… I had to cut this segment short.
They wouldn’t let me cross the Canadian border because I have a carload of produce that I wanted to gift to the monarchy of that country (they still have that, yeah?) so I landed at Kintla Lake which is only a few kilometers from the border. It was a total haul to get there… through the fire zone and all.
Road to the Sun… or whatever the fk it’s called… you need a reservation. There’s a trick to that…
The glacier lake has an aqua color and is surreal. It’s within a National Park so there’s just no escaping people. The campground was tight quarters and packed. I was about to use my bear spray for the very first time and there were no bears around.
I had a nasty head cold and it hit full force… all the smoke and miles of dust and I couldn’t handle it any longer. I had scheduled myself to be there for 3 days but I was miserable and packed up after an hour on the lake and left the same way I had just come but very much in a hurry to be elsewhere.
I pointed myself to the town of WhiteFish, MT to buy some antihistamines post hast. My head was so ballooned up and despite having a metered cup to dish out doses of Nyquil, I guzzled from the bottle. I stopped at McDonalds because I knew I had to eat. Pulled into the medical center and parked, ate my food, and took another shot of NyQuil and crawled in the back of the adventure pod and passed out.
I woke up in the parking lot of the WhiteFish Medical Center… only mildly believing I knew my own name. I was in an over-the-counter drug haze or possible overdose… but my head cleared a bit and my nose was no longer gushing. I convince myself that I know my own name… and put a hand over one eye so I could drive and headed to the local rec center. I took a swim and composed myself… and totally felt like shit but ten times better than the day before, and I would be high on NyQuil for another several hours and continued on towards FlatHead Lake… and then Missoula, MT where I have the finest cheapest room booked for a night of rest. It has an air mattress and everything.
Yay, for boosting immune systems.
