July 8th: Livingston, Bozeman, Conrad Montana (Day 16)

Livingston was really cute! First we stopped to do laundry, catch up on email, and make some phone calls. A fellow Texan caught me photographing the prairie dogs right outside the laundry and asked “where are you from??!”, when I told him Texas, he said “well – you’ve seen gopher’s right? Well these are the same thing – target practice!”

We had a great lunch at a cute Italian bistro. We began to notice that every little town that we went to had a senior center right downtown so everyone can get to it! We shopped at the senior center thrift shop and Cheri bought a genuine forest ranger uniform jacket! We wandered to several other thrift stores, tried to find the local brewery, Neptune’s Brewery (which turned out to be closed, so we just bought some bottled at the store. It wasn't really worth looking for in the first place). After Livingston we headed to Bozeman, where we hit several thrift stores and used ski/outdoor shops to get some winter essentials.

Bozeman was really cool and hip and reminded us of Austin (if it were in Colorado). It was cute, but we wanted to get a little out of town before settling for the night. Our plan was to drive just out of town and get a campsite – but we wound up driving to Great Falls to find camping. The only campground we could find in Great Falls (Mostly RV – only 5 campsites), was sandwiched between 2 highways, a railroad and in a really bad neighborhood, so we decided to move on and drive until we found the next campsite outside of town. That night we drove and drove but there was no camping to be found. The towns got smaller and smaller, too small to support any hotels. We couldn’t figure out why there were suddenly no camping sites in this part of the state since we had seen tons before. Our answer came when we stopped on the side of the road to let the dogs out to pee – The mosquitoes swarmed like nothing you have ever seen before – worse than a swamp in Louisiana, Florida, or East Houston! The car was full within minutes and we spent the next 2 days killing them. Needless to say, we gave up on camping.

We drove on to Conrad in the dark and found a cute Motel. The owner had already left for the night, but there was a phone on a TV tray outside the office with his number written next to it. Luckily, they allowed pets and had one room left. We waited a few minutes for him to show up and get us into our room. We loaded in and then realized that it was very stuffy and the AC window unit had a “Do not use this unit, it has been winterized”. Kevin had to go around back to see if it had indeed been winterized – it hadn’t thank goodness. We finally got everything settled and hit the sack after a very long day.