The Rest of Our Week in Bozeman, Montana

After Judy and Rick left on Tuesday, the 27^th, we worked a while and then went into town. We checked out an antique store and other shops. Then we ate at Burger Bobs, which was delicious. On Wednesday, we worked a while and then we went to the Museum of the Rockies to see the traveling da Vinci exhibit as well as the rest of the museum. The museum had three main sections that we found amazing; the da Vinci exhibit, the dinosaur fossil rooms, and the living farmhouse. The da Vinci exhibit was amazing simply because da Vinci was amazing. The exhibit included many machines that he drew but never actually created. The machines were built using his drawings. The dinosaur exhibit featured many dinosaurs and dinosaur parts unearthed in the area. And, the living farmhouse was a late 1800s actual house that is staffed by volunteers. The volunteers man a garden, can the produce, make quilts, and prepare daily meals in the farmhouse—all using late 1800s methods. Very interesting!

During the rest of the our week in Bozeman, we saw and did many interesting and fun things. For example, we at at “Ted’s” twice. It’s a very quaint restaurant in an old hotel with covered outside seating (the green umbrellas). The buffalo bench is also there. We really enjoyed the atmosphere at Ted’s, although we never saw the famous owner who the waitresses say stops in often—Ted Turner.

We attended the Friday night “Music on Main Street” where four blocks of the city were blocked off for a concert. The weather was great and we sat listening to music and people watching for a couple hours. For this event, we parked by an elementary school that had a sculpture of an old school marm on a bench. Quaint!

Roger read that the best breakfast in town was at the Main Street OverEasy, so we checked it out. The building had a large, old-rock wall that was very charming and the breakfast was great. By coincidence, we were sitting next to the people who are our neighbors at the campground. So, we sort of ran into someone we “knew”!

We took a hike on the Bear Canyon Trail, which was near our campground. It was a lovely hike, but I found myself worrying about the bears. A week ago, a bear killed a man in Yellowstone. All the news coverage of that tragedy has given me a fear of hiking through bear country. I now realize how lucky we were with our two bear encounters during our trip.

The two pictures showing a city building with the mountains in the background are of the Bozeman library where we ended up going to do most of our Internet work since the campground Internet was unreliable. The last picture showing the cow sculpture also has the library in the background. The pictures of me sitting at the tiny table by a wall is also in the library. The picture at the picnic table shows our new blue camping canopy. We really liked the one Rick and Judy had in their RV, so after they left, we bought our own.

The pictures of all of the people meandering around after our canopy picture is the Farmers Market we went to on Saturday morning. It is a local event that happens every week and was quite enjoyable. About 80 % of it was inside so we did not have to contend with the high-altitude sun.

One day we drove up into the mountains to see Bridger Bowl, a ski resort. As luck would have it, while we were up there, we ran into a marble-sized hail storm. The white stuff I am holding in a couple pictures are handfuls of hail balls after the storm was over. We were glad that our car was not dented.

We took the picture showing a road leading to a few houses, the picture showing the house up in the foothills, and the pictures of the horse and rider sculptures at the Northwest Art Casting company on the dead end road by our campground. It was a great place for a long evening walk since it was nicely shaded by the hills, although we didn’t walk down the road until our last night in Bozeman. The last night was really our only chance to walk down the road since the only other evening without a rainstorm was Friday night when we were at Music on Main.

On Monday morning before we left Bozeman, we went into the library to work so we would be completely caught up before heading out for North Dakota. Adele, the campground owner, let us have a late checkout so we would have time to do our computer work. I think she was flexible since she knew we were supposed to have good Internet at the campground.