The night before we stayed the night in Bigfork, MT at the Islander Inn in the Maui Room (maybe visions of times to come)! The Inn was cute, clean,
and had a view of Flathead Lake. The area is beautiful. The plan had been to hang out at the Raven Bar and Grill lakefront and celebrate Margarita Monday/Full Moon Party but when they stared to roll in in earnest Tom and I took the old fart exit and planned the next day in our room. We had breakfast in town, packed up and headed out to Bozeman. Took the north west road around the lake. I had wanted to see about Wild Horse Island, but the lake was a little choppy and we had gotten off schedule and decided to try and put on some miles and make it as far as Bozeman today (300 miles).
Coming south from the lake to Missoula there were amazing mountains to our east - even some with snow. We stopped at a Point Marker that identified them as Mission Mountain Range. We ended up going through and past Missoula because of time and stopped at Beavertail Hill SP. Who's to know - they didn't have much in the way of attractions, but they did have WiFi!
Note to old farts: put the food in watertight containers in the cooler! When we stopped for lunch, we realized that the food containers had leaked and all the sandwich meat and cheese was waterlogged. The ham really took it on the chin. We repacked the cooler and had a nice lunch on a shaded picnic table to the wildlife viewing experience of a life time - 1 chipmunk .
On to Butte . About 10 miles outside of Butte on the west side of the highway they was a highly tall smokestack up against the mountains. Didn't get a photo (stole this from the internet) and we were past it when we hit exit 208. I used the miracle of the internet to find out it was the Anaconda Stack, apparently associated with a long gone copper smelting plant. When we figured out what it was we really would have liked to have visited. A state park now but the stack was/is? the highest masonry structure in the world. Washington monument will fit inside of it.
Lesson - Stop when you see something.
We kept on putting the miles behind us and when I called to reserve a room in Bozeman, the Fairfield Inn was full so we did a Residence Inn.
NTOF: Call in morning or previous night for hotel, even out west.
The hotel was great but the laundry was out of order, and it was about time to get some clean clothes. A Texas Roadhouse was right next door to the hotel so we did that for dinner. We were really not impressed - Tom's steak was OK but my filet was not good - you would thin out here in beef country it wouldn't be hard to find a good steak. We shuffled back to the hotel for the night and then to Little Big Horn and then Billings the next day.