Chillin' in Bozeman

Backyard view
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Our drive into Bozeman was easy and beautiful (Jon took many, many photos, and this is just one of the beautiful ones) and ended with the loveliest of all: rolling into the beautiful house of one of our closest family friends, high atop a hill with splendid views. After the rain and the hail and the camping and the not camping and the PBJs and the Subway dinners, the Pieczenik house was like a suite at the Plaza. We ate, we drank, we slept a lot and we played with the adorable, adorable kittens that Sharon is fostering until they are old enough to be adopted. I took about a billion kitten pictures which can be seen here (you must click, or else a kitten will die):

Frontyard view
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http://picasaweb.google.com/julia.green/Kitties

Hippos are really cute (when they're not killing people).

Friday night we crashed and Saturday morning we had an excellent brunch at Main Street Overeasy, after visiting the Stockyard Cafe and finding that it's closed for June and possibly forever. For the two readers who are at all familiar with Bozeman, the proprietress is getting married and moving on to greener pastures.

Along I-90
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After brunch we nosed around downtown a little bit and then headed back home to feed the chickens before settling in for the all-important post-brunch nap. Then there was some laundry, then there was some kitten loving. Dr. P. took us to Montana Ale Works for bison burgers, which were freakin' awesome, and then we went to campus for a little Shakespeare in the park.

Bozeman is a really pretty town -- a bit precious (expensive outdoor apparel stores etc), but populated by very low-key and friendly folks. Many of the young year-rounders in Bozeman are ski bums -- they bus tables or do construction all summer so they can enjoy the skiing and snowboarding all winter. Not a bad life I say.

After Shakespeare in the Park, we went to one of Sharon's friend's house for a screening of a documentary she is working on. Sharon is getting an MFA at MSU and although I forget the official name of her degree, the gist is making science/natural history documentaries. She herself just came back from shooting lemurs in Madagascar.

Her friend's film was called Pablo's Hippos. Apparently druglord extraordinaire Pablo Escobar (please no Entourage spoilers) imported two hippos to live on his insanely large hacienda in Colombia. They remain there today, happily breeding and wandering around the property, occasionally teased by area children. It was an interesting piece and if you didn't know, hippos are really cute (when they're not killing people).

But not as cute as the kittens. Be sure to look at the kittens. We could have stayed in Bozeman forever, but we knew that we couldn't sleep and eat Pieczenik-purchased meals forever. We bid our wonderful hosts farewell Sunday afternoon and headed north, towards Glacier National Park...

Jon's P.S.  Bozeman is a pretty cool town;  it has the country's only skiing co-operative.  It is unfortunate that most of you readers will never get a chance to stay at the Pieczenik's, however if they ever turn their house into a B&B I recommend without reservation that you stay there.

So the blog is now pretty much caught up.  We're about 100 miles south of the Canadian border, not far from the east entrance to Glacier.  So... no entries for a few days and we are without cellular reception (Kristy, hope you got my message earlier today.  Probably won't be able to get in touch again until on the road after Glacier... hopefully sometime Wednesday before we pull into Seattle).  If you are wondering how we are updating the blog now, despite no cell phone we do have a wi-fi signal at a one-star motel we opted for rather than camping due to the rain (again, this freakin' weather works against us... about a half hour from here another interruption by the emergency broadcast system, although this time we missed the brunt of the storm by a more comfortable margin.  At least this place is only marginally more than camping would have cost... go AAA discount).  Oh, and a tabby named Goldie has befriended me and is sitting outside of our room right now meowing for me to come out and play.  Or feed it.  But Julia won't let me.

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