Into The Great Wide Open: Postscript
Our son and his son, our grandson, quarantined for ten days and are now back at work and in school. My granddaughter continually tested negative; I speculate she had it last Spring in a very mild case. My daughter-in-law remains well, stalwart, caring for her family, by the grace of God.
It took me a while to get this trip written up; we bought new computers in June. We laugh at a concept our daughter-in-law introduced to us, the Law of Unintended Consequences. It strikes all the time. AdventureMan discovered he has to keep his old computer running in order to play his favorite game. I discovered I had never uploaded any photos from my camera to my new computer, and didn’t have a card reader with an appropriate connector. It took me two orders from Amazon to find the card reader which would connect and upload photos. It is also beautiful, in rose gold, and it gives me pleasure to use it.
In answer to a question I often get, yes, I take notes. I don’t often nap in the afternoon because then I don’t sleep well at night, so while AdventureMan catches a little snooze, I write up our experiences while they are still fresh. As I waited to receive a working card reader, I wrote up the narrative, and then once I had my photos, inserted them where they would be most helpful.
AdventureMan was inspired in Bozeman, at the Italian Blacksmith, and yesterday he was busy gathering supplies and planning dinner. Here is his first success at a charcuterie plate. I cannot imagine how he can make this any better than it was; it was a glorious festival of taste treats. (He made the pickled red onions himself!)
I have included a link to the Blacksmith Italian website above; if you are visiting Bozeman, it is a guaranteed hit.
Leaving Bozeman, Day 14
AdventureMan hates my phone alarm, which is a tune called “Twinkle.” He always says it reminds him of hotel mornings when we have to get up at what he calls “The Cr#p of Dawn.” This was one of those mornings, we need to be up, get to the airport, turn in the car, check in two hours in advance, etc.
It all goes smoothly. We drop our keys in the drop box, still a little nervous that we never received a contract for the upgraded vehicle. By the time we reached Dallas, I had a confirmation of the car rental return and a copy of the contract. Go figure.
The airline people were not at the airport two hours before the flight. Oh well. We checked in and had time for breakfast at the Copper Horse before boarding for our flight. In Dallas, we found a BBQ take-out and ate in the waiting room.
We arrived safely back in Pensacola, on time, and there were zero taxis and about six sets of people in front of us. We never do this, but we called our son and asked if he would pick us up. He arrived, fully masked, welcomed us back, and drove us home. That night, he texted that he and our grandson both tested positive for COVID and the family would be quarantined, They live just blocks from us, so we were able to see them, to bring groceries or whatever they might need. They were tired and achey, but never got very very sick.
I just took a break; AdventureMan asked me how the trip report was coming and I said I was finishing up and I was astonished at how much COVID had been an influence on this trip. From the start, when Viking cancelled our planned cruise in May, to the end, with hotels and restaurants struggling to find staffing, COVID had played a major role. We need to be paying attention. Things are changing. We are going to need to do things differently. We need to start figuring out those strategies now.
Into the Great Wide Open, Day 13, Bozeman and the Museum of the Rockies
We have space! I am up early, and I can brew a pot of coffee while AdventureMan sleeps in. We are not in a hurry, the Museum of the Rockies won’t even open until 9:00, so we can take our time. We like museums, and we really like the Museum of the Rockies. Last time we were there, they had a visiting exhibit on Genghis Khan; this time they have an exhibit called Vikings Begin, and I love all the new things we are learning about Viking culture and explorations. We have a quick breakfast downstairs, grab what we need and head out.
Usually when we get to a museum we are early and there are few people. This time, there is a bus load of people who look a lot like us. They seem to be Montanan, maybe not from Bozeman, but maybe a church group or an affiliated group of some kind, around our age, all of them. There are also a few families with children. Not a big crowd but a healthy number of people.
We go through the Viking exhibit, which is exquisite, but small. I watch a couple of the videos, blown away by how far the Viking trading ships went, from deep into current day Russia to the coastal areas of North America.
We go through the early western exhibits, then split off, AdventureMan to spend time with the dinosaurs, and me to see a planetarium presentation on the northern skies. I love this show; it focuses on what our early ancestors saw from different countries, they show us the differences between what people see in Bozeman, at 45° latitude, New Orleans, at 30° latitude, and Northern Europe and Alaska, at 60° latitude.
I had a little time after the show to visit the gift shop, which had many empty shelves, which they were busy replenishing. As I checked out, I asked “didn’t you used to stock more of just about everything?” and she told me that they were even pulling stock from old exhibits to display as the containers were not arriving with new stock. This is another recurrent theme, here, in Pensacola and just about anywhere we travel, problems with the supply chain. This COVID has put a huge kink in the old normal, and we are going to have to find new ways of dealing with changes brought about by both COVID and climate change.
Our lunch was hilarious. The Museum of the Rockies is close to down town Bozeman, so we found a parking place and walked around until we found something that looked like it would do. It was called the Main Street Over Easy, and you go through a door and down a hallway to find it. We arrived just at change-over time; the place was packed with breakfast eaters just finishing up, and we were shown to a table and given breakfast menus.
A lady at the next table said “At the risk of being intrusive, they have a lunch menu. Just ask for it.” She was right. We asked for the lunch menu and we got it. The server, who was a delight, said “Here’s the menu but today we don’t have any burgers.”
Not a problem. I ordered a French Dip and a salad, AdventureMan ordered Fried Fish sandwich with salad. I don’t know how long it took to get them; we were engaged in conversation with the lady who was from Whitehall, between Butte and Bozeman. We were as interested in her, and her views, as she was in ours. We both have governors who have forbidden schools to mandate masks. (Upon my return from Montana to Florida, both our son and his son tested positive for COVID and are currently still in quarantine.)
We headed back to our hotel to strip our bags, re-pack, and in my case, iron my little linen dress for the next day. We rested up, then headed out for dinner, again at the Blacksmith Italian.
We had a booth in a side room, more quiet until a large family arrived to celebrate a special occasion, and that was fun, too.
AdventureMan ordered the Caprese Salad and the Charcuterie board has his entree. The Caprese salad was wonderful, the tomatoes had taste and the cheese is house-made. I ordered squid ink noodles with shrimp and crab, very tasty, spicy, just the way I like it. Our last night in Montana, so we split the Tiramisu, which is really enough for four people, loaded with a rich whipped cream on top and a taste of liqueur moistening the ladyfingers. We shouldn’t have, but we enjoyed every bite.
Into the Great Wide Open: Day 12, Jackson Hole to Bozeman through Idaho
I have a Swedish sausage with my breakfast, because of Swedish descent as I am, I have never had a Swedish sausage. I like the taste, but not the consistency, which is kind of loose and crumbly. Great coffee, great muesli and love those berries.
Gas leaving Jackson Hole is $3.99 a gallon at the cheapest station.
I take a photo of the motel we stayed more than forty years ago, just outside Jackson Hole, when we were traveling across the USA in our Volkswagon Bus en route to Monterey, CA for grad school and language school and knew we couldn’t afford to stay inside Jackson Hole. We were right across from the Elk reserve, and once we got our little baby to sleep, we sat outside and watched the enormous herd of elk as they munched and wandered. It isn’t so far outside Jackson Hole, now, and I am glad it is still there.
This is the second day where we experience haze. We drive up over the mountains into Idaho, and spend a couple hours on very rural highways sharing the road with large combines, harvesters and all kinds of farm equipment.
The scenery starts to change when we near Big Sky and the Gallatin River. Lunch was apples with peanut butter alongside a road with trucks whizzing by.
Once again, our hotel room is not ready. As we wait, another man gets the same response and also that he will not be on his requested floor. He is very angry, says he reserved a month ago (!) and wants to be accommodated. Later I ask the desk clerk if they are having problems with finding people to work and she says yes, that it is a problem everywhere in Bozeman. I suspect that they have closed off the top floor and are also limiting the number of people they can serve until they can guarantee the ability to take care of them.
I am thinking that this has a lot to do with demographics, and problems with finding good, reliable, safe child care, and finding jobs which will protect their workers and also provide benefits. We can see that many of the hotels are now offering health insurance and educational benefits to the people they hire. I am thinking the labor market has a little leverage, and they are using it to better their conditions.
And yes, that may inconvenience business owners and managers, and inconvenience customers, like us, but for the greater good, perhaps we can find a balance where everyone wins?
Our room is lovely, and quiet, and spacious.
We have reservations for dinner at Blacksmith Italian, a restaurant we both found intriguing. Bossy Lady totally screwed up getting us there, sometimes she doesn’t really know everything, but she got us close enough and we figured out the rest.
The minute we walked in, we knew we were in the right place. It was full of local people. The plates coming out looked very fine. The smells were delicious.
We split a platter of meats and cheeses; it was full of delicate tidbits, duck and Italian sausage and tiny pickled peppers filled with ricotta, etc. This came with crispy tasty triangular bread, a little salty, very tasty. AdventureMan had mussels and a side of pasta as his main course, and I had calamari with a Putenesca sauce and a side of pasta. The sauce was fabulous; I didn’t even need the calamari, the sauce was so engaging. The wines were equally good; I had a Barbera and AdventureMan has a Lacryma Cristi white wine which was so good, I ordered it the next night.
Yes. It was so good we reserved for the next night, too. It would be our last night in Bozeman, might as well end on a high note.
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