Farewell Yellowstone

[July 14]
Today is the day we leave Yellowstone. We’ve had six nights here (ok 5.5 really). We woke up and headed straight to do laundry… They had facilities right at the campground. After the laundry, he drove up past T. Roosevelt Lodge, past Mammoth, and out the North Entrance of Yellowstone. We got to drive through the Theodore Roosevelt Arch (They were building it when he rode through on his tour of the park. He laid the corner stone). It was a little weird getting out of the park and seeing a regular town again.

We drove along the Yellowstone River Valley in Montana for a while. A very pretty valley. On our drive the landscape turned from lush forest to a dryer landscape without a lot of trees. We saw lots of ranches.

Our next stop was in “Downtown Trendy Bozeman” Montana. It’s a bigger city than we were expecting it to be. Downtown was a happening place, but seemly quite hoity. Supposedly a lot of movie stars hang out there but we didn’t see any.

As we were leaving we decided we needed to get an oil change. We stopped at a Jiffy Lube and where shocked by their $40 price (and that we would need to disconnect the trailer). We decided to try somewhere else. It turns out that the normal price for oil changes here is $40-45 for a standard car… Little did we know that we were just starting to learn about the high prices in Montana…

One more stop, a quick visit to McD’s at Wal-Mart… Well we have re-enforced our distain for Wal-Mart, even though it was really McD’s that was bad this time. We had McNuggets. Super dry, yeech.

We pushed on and made it to Missoula. We decided to stay at a motel for the night, to get cleaned up better and hopefully find a pool ;) We stopped at several hotels, going rate was $145+ after AAA discount! Yikes! More high prices in Montana. We kept looking around and found a much more reasonably priced Econolodge. As soon as we checked in we headed out for Pizza. We stopped at Mackenzie River Pizza Company. Wow, this was great. We had a 50/50 pizza, half was a Taco Pizza, the other half a Hot Hawaiian. The toppings were fantastic; the taco side was our favorite. It was on a scrumptious sour dough crust with blue corn chips as one of the toppings, yum! We’d definitely eat there again.

Now before everyone thinks that all we did was eat out, so far we have had two loafs worth of sandwiches, packages of summer sausage, salami, and ham. Lots of beef sticks and some cheese curds from back home. Lets not even talk about the tubes of Pringles and Herseys bars…

When we got back to the hotel, we hit the hot tub. It didn’t satisfy the desire for a swimming pool but it was still great.