Monday, May 9, 2011

Capitol & Missouri headwaters

With a lazy start to the day sorting out Valerie's borrowed cell phone at AT&T, we ambled up to Montana's Capitol building.  There was a reasonably sized crowd outside for a walk/run for MS with a country band making a lot of noise for a Saturday morning.  We eventually found a way in to the Capitol & wandered its empty corridors for a while taking it all in - for such a small (in population) state, Montana's is pretty neat.
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Avoiding the Interstate, we headed south up the Missouri passing a whole lot more irrigated farmland & many horses (Valerie is quite taken with the wide variety of colours of horses here, compared with back home).  It even rained on us a little - I'm still not completely used to water falling out of the sky as a liquid again.  Unable to avoid the Interstate any longer, it wasn't long before we dived off it to check out Headwaters State Park.  This is where the Jefferson, Madison & Gallatin rivers meet to form the Missouri - the longest river in North America.
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  As Lewis & Clark camped nearby & one of the aims of their famous journey was to find the source of the Missouri, the park was heavy on Lewis & Clark history.  I didn't mind this too much as all I previously knew about them was that they went exploring out west & feature heavily in The Farside.  There was also a little interesting history & remaining ruins of two failed towns - Gallatin I & Gallatin II.
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Note the unwieldy fence - these are ubiquitous here.
It was a short hop to Bozeman where we have the luxury of staying two nights in a row.  Accommodation was a little hard to come by as was graduation day for Montana State University.  On the plus side, the rather nice Main Street was alive & we enjoyed a great pizza meal in a full & loud restaurant.

Distance traveled: 184 km
Best meal: The Thai pizza, of course.

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