Missoula

Missoula. We have dropped the “!”. 

Nice dog park! Hiking trails, creeks, a river, logs, and a dog that didn’t look like Georgia, but definitely played like her. She zoomied a couple times in his peripheral vision, took a couple steps toward him, and they were off, chasing each other through the trees like old friends. It was amazing — we haven’t seen her connect this quickly and easily with another dog in many years. Summer love, puppy love ❤️

Today’s goal was partly just a rest day after a long, stressful day of driving yesterday. We’re making our plans for the rest of the drive home and beyond, and that’s an activity that always makes me eager to just drive drive drive. Still, it’ll be two full days of driving before we get to Saint Paul, since Missoula is just the eye in the Montana face (I promise this will make sense if you look at a map of Montana). We expect to just reach one of the Dakotas tomorrow. Which? Depends on weather and whim. 

In the meantime, we still try to have a nice time together. Our self-imposed rule was “no driving”, so we walked around town a fair amount, including for groceries. Missoula’s reputation had preceded it for me; I knew it as a blue dot in a red sea, based around a nice college and full of outdoorsy hippy type people. That’s more or less true, but not the whole story. Real estate is bonkers, with not very nice houses in not very nice neighborhoods going for more than a million. Lots of people clearly struggling to get by, right next to lots of people with clearly very few worries. Imagine, I suppose, if Yellow Springs had sapphire mines. Anyway, the food was good (smoked chicken wings in the top 20% of all smoked chicken wings I’ve had) and they have a top notch dog park. Too many angry bumper stickers about guns though, and we did not approve of the sartorial landscape.

We finished our last walk with some delicious ice cream and on a whim I got a print that I just love. Overall thoughts? Missoula.