Tag Archives: Montana

Hardly a Hotel to Be Had

We really need to keep better track of when that bike rally is going on in Sturgis if we’re gonna keep making these western road trips.

There wasn’t a hotel room to be had for about 300 miles around Sturgis, SD on Saturday night. We wound up with a campsite in Hardin, MT, where we slept in the car. At least there was a no-limit, no-coin-op shower and the bloody Internet!

I put up a post I wrote while we were off the grid from a few days ago (precedes this one). Glacier was pretty awesome, and we had a good time. I will try to write more about it when I have a little more time.

Last night we got a late start coming out of Bozeman, as we had stopped there for dinner and Michelle wanted to do a bit of shopping. We wound up taking a 1-hour tango lesson, so our quest for a hotel got a late start, and you know the rest.

Today we’re going to stop off in Deadwood, SD, probably Wall, and then hope to make Minnesota at least by the end of the day.

It’s gonna suck to go back to work.

Stage Three

We’re into the third segment of our vacation now as I write this from I-15 about 30 miles south of Great Falls.

The part of Montana is just as gorgeous as the rest. Michelle and I agreed that it feels more remote than the cities along I-90, even though it doesn’t look that different, mile to mile. We attributed this feeling to the fact that neither of us have ever been to this part of the state before.

The last few days at Storyhill Fest were a lot of fun. When we got there, I had this warm feeling of coming home. A lot of the same folks made the trip, but I thought that the overnighters might have actually been a little fewer. I have no actual data to back that up.

We camped in the same spot, and our new tent slept pretty well. Michelle was warm enough with her new sleeping bag– in fact, both of us got a little sweaty the first night. Overnight Monday into Tuesday, it rained off and on throughout the night, and there were a couple times I was woken and lied awake worrying about the fly blowing off in the gusty wind. This was irrational, of course, because the fly was tied to the tent which was staked to the ground and contained two sleeping people to weigh it down. The wind was blustery enough that a little rain did sneak under there and get inside at one point, though.

The performances themselves were great. We bought CDs from The Get Up Johns (a bluegrass brother duo), Meg Hutchinson (folk-pop singer-songwriter), and Edie Carey (see Meg Hutchinson). Aaron Espe and Justin Roth performed again too, but we already have all those CDs. Interesting development in the personal life of one of the artists– last year, Aaron Espe met a girl at the SH Fest, and two weeks ago, they got married. Kinda neat. Chris and John were great in their typical fashion. We heard a couple new songs, but I don’t remember them really specifically. Each of them played a new song that they admitted were works in progress.

As a sidebar, I asked Justin Roth if he had his house concert dates for Wisconsin in October filled up. He said he still had a Tuesday open, but since Milwaukee is so relatively close to his home in Minneapolis, I should just write and let him know if Jen wants to host a show at her house. Might try to do that.

On Tuesday, we skipped out on the daytime Fest activities in favor of a rafting trip on the Gallatin River. There was a place we found online that did a 2-hour trip for a little less than 50 bucks a head. We had a really good time. Our guide was this fun older guy named Jim. He was born in the U.P. and said he spent most of his adult life in Lansing. He knew a lot of Yooper jokes. We shared a boat with a group of four people from Houston who were in the area for a conference of some kind.

The river itself was a bit less challenging than what Michelle and I had hoped for. I think we were both hoping for something that would be a little harder than the trip we took on the Wolf River at home last August. I got the impression from the guides that this is simply a time of year when the river is pretty low and the rapids are not that rough. Maybe we should try coming back earlier in the summer, or specifically try to find a trip that’s tougher.

So with the rest of today we have to make it Glacier and get our tent up. That’s the extent of our plan. Tomorrow, we’re going on a horseback ride mid-morning, and on Friday I want to try to do some hiking and photographing. We’ll be leaving the park again on Saturday, and we’re shooting to take the “low road” (I-90) all the way across to Wisconsin. We’ll have stops back in Bozeman and in South Dakota along the way.

Til then…

An Update of Sorts

Been trying to get a lot done at work this week, so sorry if you’ve been anxious for more news. A few items of note:
– Had a nice first-weekend-of-July at a cabin that Michelle’s cousins had rented up in Waupaca. They had us stay over for the weekend, and we pitched in for a little pontoon cruise on Saturday. It was fun.
– Saw the new Harry Potter movie this evening. I enjoyed it. Jen seemed to have a good time, too. I could tell she was a little disappointed in the omissions from the book (which is pretty typical), but to be honest, I didn’t remember enough from the book to really notice. Those last two books went really quickly for me, and to be honest, I retained very little. I should probably go back and re-read both before the final installment comes out in a couple weeks.
– Oh and I found an apartment.
Here’s the address: 6524 W Wright St in Wauwatosa. It’s a 2-bedroom in this older duplex. Jen came over with me when I signed the lease and commented that I would probably need more furniture to fill it up. That could be true.

I’m glad that I found it, and it has basically all the amenities I was looking for (close to bus line, garage parking, ample storage, laundry in the basement), but I’m still a little apprehensive about it. I took Jen with me to look at it, maybe in part because I wanted her to find something wrong with it. The landlord lives downstairs, and that’s not a situation I’ve ever lived with before, so I’m a little on-edge about how that will work. Even though I’ve run the budget figures up and down, I’m still a little worried about making sure I have enough money every month. Maybe I also felt a little bit of pressure to get into a place right away, just because the prospect of remaining homeless over the duration of my upcoming MT vacation had me scared shitless. I think I may have mentioned before that I like to move in to places that I’m actually excited to go to. I’m not excited about this place, it just happened to be the first one that met all my criteria and I could move in a little early. Not that’s it a bad place at all. It’s a very nice place. I’m sure if you get to see it, you’ll like it. Maybe I’ll feel better once I get there, but for the time being, I am very guardedly glad to have it.

Meanwhile, speaking of vacation, Michelle and I have been deep in the throes of planning. I think we’ve got a good, tentative outline of everything we want to do and see while we’re in Montana for Storyhill Fest and a visit to Glacier National Park. We already bought the tickets and stuff for Storyhill quite a while ago, and we booked the campsite at the Park, now we just have to decide on a rental car and some of the trips (horseback riding, rafting) that we want to do and we’ll be more or less set. The trip-planning has been a lot more fun for me than anything else I’ve had going on lately. I really, really, really hope I can relax by the time it’s time to go.

I think I’ll leave you for now and go lie awake for a couple hours while I wait for 4:30 to return…