Our apartment is upstairs again, smaller than last year but still quite nice. The stairs are outside, the advantage being the first thing I see outside our door is the spreading branches of an old oak tree while a pine aroma wafts over the place.
It feels so good to be back in Bozeman! The downtown has some changes. A nice restaurant we liked last year is now gone. In another space, a place called "Bisl" popped up. If you know Yiddish, you'll recognize the meaning, "a little". Had dinner there last night.
It's very nuevo cuisine, familiar ingredients combined in unique ways. For their website click HERE.
Other storefronts are being remodeled.
Our favorite breakfast place Nova Cafe always has a wait for a table, as usual. The omelettes can be eclectic, incorporating kale & other such healthy ingredients. We ordered from the ordinary selections and upon finishing the servings we decided they were well, ordinary. Maybe not so favorite anymore.
A history lesson. Albert Gallatin (1761 - 1849) was the Secretary of the Treasury under Thomas Jefferson. In 1803, in his totally unknown behind-the-scene role, he scraped up the $3 mil (in those days a huge amount for a young country) to pay Napoleon for the Louisiana Purchase. His somewhat better known role was to finance the Lewis & Clark Expedition, but still that wouldn't have gotten him much notoriety until the expedition found the source of the Missouri as three unnamed rivers, now appropriately known as Three Forks, not far from Bozeman. I wrote about it last year & will visit the site again this trip.
Anyhow, Merriwether Lewis decided to name those rivers after the three most important men to him in the federal government. Jefferson/President, Madison/Secretary of State & later President, and our guy, Albert Gallatin. Lewis did not explore those rivers so he had no way of knowing how big or long they were. Well, the Gallatin River starts 120 miles south in Yellowstone National Park and flows north through Gallatin Canyon up to Three Forks. (We took that drive last year to a place in Big Sky to order the disappointing walleye, beautiful.)
And Bozeman is the county seat of Gallatin County. So out here in the west, good old Albert (who lived 40+ years after the discovery but never came here) is a big name. And all he really did was to push a quill pen around and make some transactions just as President Jefferson asked him to.
Here's to Albert!!!
Sorry for the reflections in the photo.
This portrait is part of the Bozeman Historical Museum, which served as the county jailhouse from the 1870's until 1982.
An 'only in Bozeman' story:
As we were leaving the museum, a very nice lady was entering & the usual friendly greetings morphed into a standing-on-the-stairs conversation. (Bozemanites love hearing good things about their city from visitors.) She graduated high school here, a very long time Bozeman resident. So long, in fact, that when the conversation came around to the jail-now-museum, she said (and I kid you not) "I remember when this was a jail. My husband spent several weekends here and I came to visit him."
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OK, back to the present. Here's an update on the Green Coalition, also posted on Facebook.
It turns out The Coalition is the local Democratic Party's reaction/alternative to the Tea Party. It seems back in 2009 the TP was determined to hold a 4th of July parade in Bozeman. The Dems felt that Independence Day was for everyone, not just the TP. Long story short, TGCOGL4J now obtains the only available Independence Day parade permit, then does not hold a parade. The TP relegates itself to a city park.
This fellow sells t-shirts & bumper stickers; any proceeds exceeding expenses are donated to the local food bank. He's also running for county commissioner as a Democrat.
How could we NOT join such an effort??
We decided Susanne will be our family representative to The Coalition.
For the full inside story of The Coalition written by the very nice man in the photo above, check out this LINK.
Another update...we went back to Three Forks, toured the L&C area, then went into town and had walleye at their most famous hotel, the Sacagawea (known to locals as 'The Sac', built in 1910, remodeled a hundred years later). But this time I tried a better way. Before we left home I was in communication with the chef, so when we ordered the walleye, he served it (i.e. he brought it to our table) just the way we wanted it...fabulous! So fabulous that we dug right in & forgot to take pics. Oh well, next year.
We did remember to shoot the creme brulee avec chocolate spoon.
Some Sac photos. It was 8pm, the sun was about to set...the exterior color is really quite white.
Traveling throughout Montana we saw signs about something called a "buffalo jump". It wasn't until we stopped to read one that we discovered what it was. Back in the 19th century and probably for centuries before that, the Native American tribes lived off of the buffalo; hides, meat, everything. Killing them with bows & arrows had to be extremely difficult. They figured out a much, much easier way. Why not simply herd them and drive them off a cliff? (Yikes!) Well, they did that and those sites became known as 'buffalo jumps'. On our way to Three Forks, we saw such a sign and decided to check it out. It was further back in the hinterlands than we expected but we finally got there.
A few pics.
Just a big, ole cliff.
Susanne likes to shoot what I call "micro-pics", shots of small things & small areas. Here's some of what she's done:
She really doesn't like insects unless they're seen through the camera.
OK, I've got to get organized for tomorrow. We're heading to Missoula, a bit over 200 miles to the west. A larger city with a bigger tango community and two restaurants we really enjoyed last year, one French, the other Italian. Our first love is Bozeman, but a couple of days visiting our second love ain't too bad either.
Bye!!!
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