Montana...The Open Road

Yesterday was a driving day for me in Montana and I came to a few realizations:

1. I like Montana around this time of year. They've had a lot of precipitation in the past few weeks and everything has greened up making it just beautiful.
2. Montana is one of the few places I've ever been where you can be driving in straight prairie, crest a hill, and then be driving in a forest.
3. Montana is one of the few places I've driven where you can be going down a main road and not pass a single house/car for over 30 miles!

I left Great Falls yesterday morning and drove East on my way to Colstrip. Along the way I traveled across some beautiful country and loved almost every bit of it. The geography in this part of the USA is awesome and I wish I had a lot more time on my drive to stop and take pictures. Lots of sandstone rock walls lining the road that have so many photo opportunities and also would have been great to top-rope and climb. I ended up getting a little off the beaten path, literally, when I decided to take Montana highway 310 between highways 12 and I94 and it wasn't one of my better ideas. The road was paved for the first 25 miles, then it became a dirt road for about 10 miles, then it became a large-pebbled road (kind of like the shore on the ocean!). The car got very dirty and I was a little concerned about rock damage on the new Caliber.

Yesterday I was thankful for a number of things:

1. Being able to do the drive on someone else's dime
2. Cruise control. On long, flat, open roads it sure was nice to not have to worry about my speed
3. Under-carriage protection. I thought some of those rocks were going to leave holes in the bottom of the car!
4. Space. How awesome it was to drive for miles and miles and not run into a single person and not to see any signs of civilization aside from the rough tracks of another vehicle that went along the road hours before.
5. Pavement. I was pretty excited when I got off the pebbled road!
6. Rain. While it didn't do much, it was enough to somewhat wash off the Caliber after I was done with it.

When I got into Colstrip I felt like I was on the set of "An Inconvenient Truth" (even though they didn't have a set). As you may have guessed from the name, coal is a mainstay for the town and they have a 4-tower coal-burning plant right on the edge of the city. It stank...A LOT! Great town in terms of people though and I got to experience small-town Montana to it's fullest complete with a full tour of the city (of 2,000 people) and dinner in a house-turned-restaurant with the strangest restaurant layout you've ever seen!

Today was staff training for both libraries and installation (part II) for one of them. It's been a long day and tomorrow is shaping up to be a lengthy one as well as I need to drive from here to Helena for my trade show. Hopefully I'll have some time to post pictures when I get there.

D