I had to be out of my room by 11:00 on Thursday, so I wanted to take advantage of it and not go anywhere before I had to. I got about a quarter of the way through Blue Highways before I had to check out of the room.

After carrying my backpack around all morning on Tuesday, I decided it would be nice to do something after I checked out of my room on Thursday that wouldn't involve much walking (especially with my sore toes), so I booked a Red Bus tour. The tour wasn't until 2:30, so I tried to find places around Apgar Village that I hadn't walked to yet. I spent some time on the west side of McDonald Creek, then I walked down to Apgar Transit Center. Around 1:00 I went to Eddie's and had lunch. I got a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, which was probably the best meal I had in the park. Then I waited for the Red Bus.

The buses ("Reds") were built in the 1930s by the White Motor Company. About 500 of them were built for the National Park System, but Glacier is the only park that has kept all of them in operation (there are currently 33 in the fleet). They originally had manual transmissions, which required double-clutching on the steep, winding mountain roads, and the drivers were known as "Gear Jammers" or just "Jammers," and the name has stuck even though the buses were upgraded to automatic transmissions in 1989.

When the bus got to Lake McDonald Lodge, they stopped so we could look around for a few minutes. When it was time to get back on the bus, they asked me if I'd be willing to switch buses, because my bus had filled up with people who started the tour at Lake McDonald Lodge. The single seat in the other bus was the front passenger seat, so I got to sit next to Jammer Jasmine for the rest of the tour.

The roof was open and the weather was alternately cloudy and sunny, so I had to alternate between my hat and my sweatshirt depending on the temperature. Once we got to Logan Pass it was just cold. It was only the second day the visitor center was open, and they didn't have the restrooms working yet, they had a row of chemical toilets in the parking lot.

The Jammers are really well-informed about the park and can answer just about any question you can come up with. They also have to wash their own bus at the end of the day. Jasmine is one of the youngest drivers, and someone said there's a Jammer in his eighties. We met one going the other direction that Jasmine said had been driving a Red Bus every summer since the sixties.

It was a 3-hour tour, so when it was over I had a couple more hours to kill before it was time for the shuttle to take me to the train station. And then the train was an hour late. The people who run the shuttle keep track of the train and delay their schedule accordingly, so it was about 3 hours between the Red Bus tour and the train station shuttle. I went to Eddie's and had a piece of huckleberry-peach pie for "dinner."