23. hometown tourist

One of the things I've enjoyed most about having moved is being able to explore our new home town and home state! I originally intended to make a separate post for each new area or attraction that we've visited, but since I've gotten so far behind already, I thought I'd start with this brief summary. If I can stay on top of this going forward I'll do longer descriptions in the future...

HELENA
State Capitol - free to visit, it's a beautiful building with a lovely view of the city and surrounding mountains.
Old Governor's Mansion - a lovely old mansion that costs about $5pp. Your experience will likely vary depending on the quality of the tour guide.
Steve's Cafe - delicious restaurant for breakfast and lunch! I don't even like traditional breakfast food that much, and I loved this place.
Brewhouse - excellent lunch or dinner place with a wide variety of brewpub menu options and many beers on tap.
Broadwater Hot Springs - a gym with wonderful hot springs pools (4 of varying temperatures). Costs about $9pp, plus $1 per towel. A wonderfully relaxing experience! There is also an indoor gym for kids (free with their admission), and the restaurant next door serves DELICIOUS fresh/organic foods.
Carousel - located next to the Exporatorium (children's museum), it costs just a couple dollars to ride. Note that all riders (even grown-ups) are required to be buckled to their horses. Also, the ice cream counter in the building is impossible to skip once you are at the carousel!
Cathedral - modeled after the cathedral in Cologne. So  beautiful! Free to visit.

GREAT FALLS
In Cahoots for Tea - a WONDERFUL tea shop right in the downtown area.
Giant Springs State Park - state parks are free for anyone with MT license plates. This park is on the north side of town and showcases a lovely warm-ish spring right along the Missouri river.
Ryan Dam / the Great Falls - about 5 miles outside of town (you'll need a map to find it!), there is a lovely picnic area overlooking the dam and the falls. Also a fun suspended bridge to walk across to get there!
Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center - super informative! It costs about $8pp (or free if you have an annual parks pass or a senior parks pass, since this is a national park site) and it is totally worth it. They have a great display describing everything about Lewis and Clark's expedition to find the boundaries of the Missouri River (since that's what the US had gotten with the Louisiana Purchase) and to find the Pacific Ocean. I learned a lot! The movie was a bit cheesy, but worth the ~20 min if you show up at the right time. There are also some lovely paved walking paths outside along the river.
River's Edge Trail - a long paved trail along both the east and west sides of the river. With the bridge crossings, you can have jaunts of a few or many miles. Very pretty.

THE CANYON (between GF & Helena)
Recreation Road - a beautiful drive! A little slower than the interstate, but definitely prettier.
Izaak's (in Craig) - who would have thought that a sleepy little fishing town like Craig would have such a fabulous restaurant?! A little on the pricey side (we had been expecting bar food based on the outside of the building), but totally worth it for the culinary masterpieces they have. The interior is really classy. (Note that they close for the winter each year.)
Tower Rock State Park -  located at the Hardy Creek exit along I-15, this state park (free to anyone with Montana plates) has a path for about half a mile, plus visitors are free to explore anywhere beyond that / off the path. There are beautiful views that will make you thankful you're not portaging like Lewis and Clark were!

BOZEMAN
downtown - this is an affluent area, probably thanks to the college. The downtown is many blocks long and has many, many interesting and independent shops. The jewelry stores selling Montana sapphires have really beautiful things! Kid also highly recommends the toy store. :)
Missouri Headwaters State Park - outside of town a bit, this is worth the slight detour off the interstate in order to see the headwaters of the Missouri. Not quite as impressive as walking across the headwaters of the Mississippi, but fun nevertheless.
Wheat Montana - also outside of town a bit, this restaurant/bakery is to die for! They have great pastries and wonderful sandwiches. They also sell a lot of crockware, flour, etc. Definitely worth a stop!

We're looking forward to many more adventures under the BIG SKY of Montana!

22. living off-grid

Back when we started dreaming in MN about our future lives in MT, we were really excited to pursue off-grid living. We wanted to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels, to be more mindful of our energy expenditure, to be first-hand stewards of our environment, and to save a little money on our monthly expenses. One of the draws of our current house was that it seemed to be set up perfectly for just that! Solar powered electricity, water from the (very deep) well on the property, and a wood stove for heat. Perfect!

It was only after we moved in that we realized how naive we had been.

Not that we regret it, mind you, but there has definitely been a HUGE learning curve. And a realization that no one (the previous owners, the inspectors, our realtor, or the neighbors) pointed out the incredible blinders that we had on as we imagined this idyllic life for ourselves. For example:

1. There is no lumberyard nearby. So wood for our fireplace involves driving about an hour each way to fill up the back of the pickup with scraps. The wood is cheap (less than $25 for the full truck bed), but when you add on the time and the cost of fuel there/back, it adds up. And since we didn't want to risk running out (see previous post for fear of what the winter will be like up here), Husband ended up getting seven full loads. A pretty big up-front cost in order to have "no" heat bill for the winter.

Two loads. (And building a wood shed is definitely on our to-do list.)

2. The solar power doesn't work so well on cloudy days. I mean, we always knew we'd have to run the generator a bit, but no one told us just how much we'd have to run the generator. We didn't run it hardly at all for the first month we were here (August/September), but after that we started getting cloudy days and we also realized that the panels, although placed high enough above our Quonset directly to the south of them, are situated just between two hills - which effectively block both the early morning light and also the afternoon/evening light. Not a big deal in summer, but definitely an issue as the days get shorter. So recently the neighbors told us that the old owners used to run their generator for SIX HOURS PER DAY in the winter!! Quite different from the "oh, we just use it for back-up on cloudy days" story that they told us. We're already looking into whether we can cost-effectively move the panels to a better location on our property...

Husband built a shed for the new (stronger, more fuel-efficient) generator we invested in. 

3. We absolutely LOVE having visitors, but it was quite a shock to see our energy consumption change each time we've had house guests. Even in just the few months that we've lived here, we've already gotten MUCH better about turning off lights when we leave a room, using task lighting instead of whole-room lighting, not keeping electronics plugged in overnight, etc.  A huge apology to my parents (and my inlaws) for every time I've left all the lights on in the house!!


Well, we wanted an adventure when we moved, and we have definitely been getting that! It's just been so challenging in completely unexpected ways. Pretty soon we'll be true pros as this off-grid living stuff, but in the mean we are definitely soaking up the knowledge as our blinders are ripped from our naive little eyes. :)

21. more snow

As you probably saw from my last post, we were relieved to get through our first snowfall of the year. We were still nervous, however, because it wasn't a huge storm and we didn't know what it would be like after the snow really started to pile up.

I'm relieved to say that we are feeling much more confident after this past week!

Last weekend we started getting dire warnings about a MAJOR snow system coming our way from Tuesday through Saturday. I took it slow driving home on Tuesday night, and also left plenty of extra time driving in on Wednesday. It wasn't too bad, as long as I wasn't tempted to go faster than I wanted when other cars came careening past me! I wanted to be safe, thank you very much. On Wednesday I got a hotel room in town, and I was glad I did because there was a multi-vehicle crash on the bridge leading out of town. On Thursday I again took it really slow, particularly as I anticipated each bridge. Terrifyingly, I saw an accident that had just happened (I didn't witness it, but the family was still in the vehicle and totally shook up when I stopped to call 911 for them), and about 3 more crashes (all on bridges through the canyon) before I got to my parking lot to switch from my Impreza to my full-size pick-up with the studded tires. But getting up the mountain was a breeze!

Thankfully no one was hurt!

Friday I again took it slow (and slower still on the bridges), but I ended up having a delightfully uneventful ride to/from work. And when I got home from Friday night, I proclaimed that we would not be leaving the mountain until work/school on Monday. It was so beautiful!

Kid and Dog spent lots of time sledding

We visited with several neighbors today, and cautiously tried to probe about how typical this amount of snow is. (We had to have gotten at least a foot.) Thankfully, we were reassured that this much snow is VERY unusual for any given storm, and that we could still expect the Chinooks to melt the snow at least a few times throughout the winter. One neighbor showed us photos of the January that he broke ground on his house and there was no snow on the ground until the February photos when they were putting the walls up!

We know that weather can be fickle, but we are definitely relieved that our trucks handled the snow just fine (although we did put the chains on today, just to make sure we knew how to do it, even though it wasn't really necessary) and that my little Impreza will be fine as long as we're cautious on the interstate. It feels like a huge hurdle crossed to realize that we don't have to worry quite so much about winter snow any more!