Tripometer – 4421 mi
Gas Gauge – 363.427 gal
Location – Loch Leven Campground, Pine Creek, MT
Lodging – $12
Cans of OFF – 4
Paul ran off to Bozeman, MT this morning to attend a free fly fishing class at a local library while Kelly went to work at the dinette table with a stunning view of Paradise Valley. Both Livingston and Bozeman are strongly western in feel and are focused on the wealthy fishing and skiing scene. Paul swears that his fly fishing instructor would be more at ease on a snowboard than standing in a river waving a stick.
In the evening we went into Livingston to check out its historic main street and train station. We couldn’t resist the Ranger, Train Engineer picture. Interestingly, this road based train engine was built on a 1930’s International Harvester truck chassis.
Trip Note: We were hoping that someone in the waterfront sites would move and we could sneak in, but that wasn’t meant to be. It seems that the prime sites were being monopolized by a rather large extended family for the week. We faced the reality that if we wanted to move to another campground (our trailer was out in the middle of an open plain) we needed to move the next day. We didn’t want to move on a Friday or Saturday in this area due to campsite availability. We decided that we had done enough travelling for a few days and are going to stay here until at least Sunday the 19th.
The site we’re in is on the edge of a fairly large grassland along the edge of the river, many hundreds of acres. There are probably 10-15 seemingly vacant prairie dog holes in our site proper. We assume that they moved elsewhere once campers started showing up this spring and that they’ll move back in the fall. We can hear them rustling around and yelling at us from the grasses near the site. Ranger has had no end of fun with this turn of events. He *has* to be on a line full-time!