To Missoula

HI! Sorry it has been so long - we've been planning our trip back, applying to grad schools, and chillin out. Since we left off we went to Yellowstone and had a blast, the campsite our second night was snowed in so we headed to jackson, WY and stayed in a swanky hotel. We'll write more about that later, but wanted to get more recent stuff posted. Here is from leaving Jackson...

Okay. Well. We’re starting to get to the point where we don’t have much to talk about. Not on the blog, to each other. Trigger drove from Jackson, WY to Missoula and much of the ride was quiet. Thankfully we had watched sooo many episodes of Say Yes to the Dress the night before so inspired by the topic we had an interestingly vague and hypothetical conversation about each of our own independent weddings and what we would want. Our hotel room in Jackson had a TV in the bedroom and one in the sitting room and twice I tried to watch separate TV. Trigger didn’t like that idea and it came back to bite him in the butt because we could have at least talked about what we each watched on television the day before.

Anyway. We on 26 west because the other road out of Jackson required tire chains, passed idaho falls, made some PB&Js in the car for lunch and pretty much boogied through Idaho and into Montana. The landscape all around us on the drive was pretty much the same as we had been seeing cow covered plains - but getting into Montana there were amazing foothills of (we’re pretty sure) the Rockies.

About cows - we’ve seen a lot of them - grazing, munching, seemingly pretty happy. We’ve only seen two small scale feed lots. At first we thought some of the cows we saw were simply grass-fed and when slaughtered could be sold as such however after reading part of The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan and the section he has on corn I think that we are seeing cows graze before they are brought to feedlots and then to slaughter houses. There are a lot of small cows, so it could be that they go to feedlots and the mother cows stay to have more babies. The only cows I think are or should be grass-fed til the day they get slaughtered are the ones on 85 south driving through SD - there was just so much freaking grassland. Anyone know more about how this works? We need to ask someone here.

We pulled into Missoula - following directions to downtown! (not to the exit with all the hotels, but the real downtown) We got a room in the Holiday Inn Downtown at the Park for $35 on priceline a few days before and we’re pretty skied! The room was giant, no separate sitting room, but a king size bed and two couches and a chair. We pretty much dropped our stuff off and headed quickly out. I was Grump/hungr/y. Luckily we had service on the drive so I was able to tripadvisor research restaurants in Missoula. The 2nd best restaurant was called Biga Pizza (Biga like the dough starter). At first I didn’t even look at it because being disappointed by bad pizza is really sad and I figured in Montana there was a good chance that would happen. I looked through other restaurant reviews though and was surprised when a number of reviews commented that so and so restaurant was good but they like really liked Biga Pizza. I finally checked out the reviews and then their website and couldn’t help but laugh. Biga Pizza is as close to Paolina’s Way as I’ve ever seen. Thin crust brick oven pizza, not organic but “all natural, all homemade”, bluesky sodas, panzanella salad. It looked really good.

We had to wait about ten minutes for a table - it was PACKED and the food looked good. We got a panzanella salad and a caesar salad (which were not as good as PW’s) and a white pizza with roasted red peppers, artichoke hears, and kalamata olives. It was DELICIOUS! Here’s what we talked about: if you could only work with three ingredients (not including spices or water) for the rest of your life what three would they be? We’re settled on flour, milk/cream/, and tomato. After eating the salads we couldn’t finish the pizza so got to take it for lunch the next day! (oh, also, I might be kind of lactose and tolerant - need to look this up, I keep getting crazy gassy when I have too much dairy. It was unfortunate following the post-bison burger experience).

Thursday was a running day but while Matt layered up to run outside I took the opportunity to hop on the treadmill in the fitness center and watched more Say Yes to the Dress. They had a pool and hot tub but after Jackson it didn’t seem worth the chlorine.