Bozeman, Montana

Mile 4390

We have checked into a Best Value Inn in Bozeman, Montana for the night. Got here kind of early, about 7:45pm, so there is still a couple hours of daylight. Lots of time to relax a bit before hitting the sack. It'll be nice to sleep in a real bed after sleeping bags for the past few nights. Not much went on since we left Columbia Falls:


Today was mostly a driving day. Not much sight seeing. We did stop in Helena, the capital of Montana. Another nice Montana town.

Since there wasn't much else to our day, a few random thoughts about Montana:

We've done a LOT of road trips and no matter where we went, when we would scan for stations on the radio, there would always be a Spanish station coming in crystal clear. California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, even in the middle of the desert, or all along Interstate 40 across the US. There was even one point crossing from Oregon to Washington where the only station we could get was Spanish. That is not the case for Montana. The likelyhood of finding one seems to fade as you travel east.

We don't have any accurate measuring instruments, but the sky here seems to be the same size as anywhere else we have been.

There's a huge anti-crystal meth campaign going on here. It's everywhere, on billboards, tv, radio. Must really be the middle America problem you always hear about.

Took almost a full day to remember that we crossed into the mountain time zone when we got into Montana. Thought we were ahead of schedule the whole time.

The fire that detoured us at Glacier National Park continues to grow with no end in sight at this time.

Forgot to mention, we hit an owl Sunday night on the way up to Glacier National Park. It was very dark but we could clearly see it in the headlights standing on the road in the opposite lane. As soon as we got close it flew right into the car. Very strange. No idea what happened to it.

Also almost hit a deer yesterday. One thing to remember, they always seem to travel in pairs. And it's the second one that usually gets hit because you aren't expecting another. This happened to my brother in Maryland and it did serious damage to his Audi. His warning about two deer saved me this time and another time in Utah. Both were very close calls. Although I saw another one today cross the road. I wasn't going very fast so I stopped and waited for the second one which never came.