Joe & Wilma's Excellent Adventures

 Thursday, July 25, 2024

Bozeman - Mission Accomplished

We had a message this morning that the A/C unit was in and we could have it installed at mid-day today or tomorrow. We opted for today and took it over about 10:00, then went back to OverEasy for breakfast, a little restaurant right on Main Street.  There are always people walking the streets  in downtown Bozeman -- tourists, people walking their dog on the way to coffee, business people.  We walked down past a couple stores just to say we walked Main Street.

Then we headed out for a scenic drive to Bridger Canyon and Bridger Bowl Ski Area, 16 miles. We drove up to the ski resort, there’s some beautiful views along this road.  We knew the trams did not run in the summer but thought we should see the place, at least.

There are beautiful views coming down the mountain but the trees prevented a good picture.

Of course, we didn't turn around here.  Oh no, we continued on past and made a 260-mile loop drive out of it.  We saw our first wildlife, a deer laying down just inside the guard rail by the road.  We almost missed it, we weren’t looking that close.   Then we eventually saw two antelope off in the trees.

We took a side road to Shields River Road and the Custer Gallatin National Forest. The road is rather bumpy. We’ve seen one deer on this road. 

We stopped and walked over to the bridge and looked at the river. I looked for fish, but didn’t see.  We were so sleepy we considered taking a nap under the shade tree, but we continued on for a few more miles instead.  Joe thinks this house should have a good view.   

He was thinking about turning around here, but instead, we took a side road off of our side road to Porcupine Creek. It took us past the driveway to the house on the hill called Quill Hill. (I first thought it said "Chill Hill" which I thought was a better name for it.)   We just went a few miles on this road. It looked the same as what we’ve been seeing so we turned around and headed back to the main highway to finish our loop. We started out on 86, then 89, then  east on Highway 294, then 12, to 191, then back to I-90 to complete the circle.  On 294, we saw an antelope,  a deer and two sandhill cranes.  I had seen two sandhill cranes a few days earlier.

Coming out of Wilsal, there was a statue of Thunder Jack, famous from the Lewis and Clark history.  We had seen a statue of Thunder Jack several years ago after we left Yellowstone with Jeff and Brenda.  I don't know if there are multiple statues of him, but we knew we had seen him before and we had never been on this road before.

When we got to Highway 12 we ran into road construction -- probably at least 20 miles so that slowed us down.  Then we realized that we were more than 100 miles away and we were going to need to pick up the motorhome before 6:00 so Joe kicked it in high gear and we hustled back toward Bozeman at 80 mph.  That's as fast as the Jeep had in it. We saw a small herd of antelope right by the freeway between Livingston and Bozeman. We had seen one more deer and one more antelope on 191. We hit rain showers several times.  Joe corrected me. He said these are more like raindrops than showers -- just a drop every once in a while. But then we hit 27 mph wind gusts as we wound through the canyons  --that got our attention.  A truck pulling a camper in front of us just decided to pull off and wait it out, but we’re on a time schedule so Joe just forged ahead. It’s now 5 o’clock and we are almost to the east side of Bozeman, where we know there is more road construction and the RV dealership is on the far west side. Joe just said we needed about a 20-minute hard rain to get rid of the bugs and -- whoop whoop -- there you have it. We’re now under thunderstorm warnings and it’s pouring on us. The temperature has dropped 15°. We got to the dealership at 5:35 and our service writer raised her arms and shouted YEAH. The rain continued off and on, and my windshield is clean. I don’t know about the motorhome, but the jeep is good.  (Joe said the motorhome windows were clean too, so he got his wish).

But our day wasn't over.  I had mentioned to Joe that at least we shouldn't have to watch for pedestrians on Main Street since it had rained, and we were in 5:30 traffic.  Wrong!  It had quit raining, and they had 2 blocks of Main Street shut down for a music festival. And there were lots of people on the streets walking to the festival.  So we had to detour through side streets to get around that.  That wasn't fun.

We got to the campground, and again, a pickup was parked in our space.  So we both got out and rounded up someone in the office, who went and found the owner and got it moved.  I asked the people across the street if they had the new internet up, and told her about our problem with getting the TV online, so she volunteered her son (I think) to come look at it, she said he was an IT guy.  So he came over, but still no luck.  Then we headed back to town to get something to eat.  We passed a rodeo that we would have loved to go to, but we were too tired.  Wished we had known about that earlier.  We finally finished our day and called it.  But we are SO HAPPY to have the back A/C working.  Better days ahead!