17th July – 22nd July 2023
Big Dave settled into his usual rythmn of an effortless 65 mph up the I-90 and soon we had left Wyoming and entered Montana. The Big Sky State. Allegedly. Unfortunately our spectacular views of the surrounding mountain ranges and the famed celestial hugeness was skuppered by wildfire smoke in the air, drifted down from Canada. We would have to use our imaginations. It was still quite impressive though. Our next two night stop was in Billings, a reasonably utilitarian city of about 120,000 people and Montana’s largest. To put that in context, there are 281 larger cities by population in the USA. Near here is the site of the ‘Battle Of Little Bighorn’ and ‘Custer’s Last Stand’, a place that we had visited and toured in 2017. We opted not to stop again as we could guarantee there had been no changes to the historical facts on offer. Our park in Billings was a bit of a celebrity campsite, the original (and flagship) KOA. This is a campsite company that the branding is an unmistakable yellow logo and all offer great quality of amenities and service. This was the first ever and had been going since 1962. Situated on the banks of the Yellowstone River it had a lovely pool and – this was a clincher for us – a complimentary mini golf course. There was going to be a (free) showdown….
Before we installed ourselves we treated Big Dave to an oil change. Due to our clearance being about 12 ft it is hard to find ‘Lube Shops’ that will fit him in with Tin Can on board, but in Billings we found a place. It could accommodate full sized trucks(lorries, my UK friends) and dealt with customers on a first-come-first-served basis. So we joined the very short queue and ate our car picnic whilst he was being dealt with. There was even a loo available in the reception area. Perfect. It doesn’t take much to keep us happy.
I have mentioned before that often we seem to just happen upon interesting events going on in places that we visit. The converse can also be true. Billings was going to be hosting “Montana’s biggest annual balloon festival’ about two days after we left here. Never mind. As a taster of the things that we were going to miss the campsite had arranged for their branded balloon to come to the camp and set up a non-launch display. We attended, we saw, we photographed.
We had plans to cycle the 3-4 miles into Billings downtown whilst we were here to have a look around and yes, you guessed it Eric of Morda, find somewhere for a burger & beer dinner but we didn’t. A combination of the heat, a fridge full of nice food and deciding that we just couldn’t be bothered kept us in camp for both nights. The closer we get to the end of this trip, the less we feel the need to venture out to experience ‘normal’ things on our travels. Our wallets and cholesterol levels thank us too. So we cooked in and spent our first evening chatting to our neighbour, a divorcé called Justin who was travelling by himself. He was a self confessed introvert but we bamboozeled him with conversation anyway.
The mini golf summary of play is: Nick 2- Sara 0. I was well and truly beaten, especially in the second round. I got the yips, bigtime, and I let myself down. There was no excuse for my poor play, despite an early showing with a hole-in-one on my first hole. I’ll get him next time.
Our next stop was a rare ‘one-nighter’ in Bozeman, another place beginning with ‘B’ along the I-90. This was purely a sleeping stop and we had planned to do absolutely nothing. This, retrospectively, was poor planning as we discovered that the city was hosting the Montana State Fair that week, exactly the sort of thing that we usually seek out and base whole itineraries around. We were right there but had left ourselves no time to go to it. We realised quite quickly that pretty much all the other occupants of the RV park were there because of the fair and we had had no idea. No wonder it had been busy when we had booked! Oh well.
Our last stop in Montana was a rare re-visit. Butte. Pronounced bewt, not butt. This was a place that we had previously stopped at in May 2017, a month into our first trip and we had developed a strange affection for this quirky town. It is an ex-mining town and has an enormous decomissioned open-cast mine pit right next to it. The ‘Berkeley Pit’, now an oddly beautiful lake, has filled with toxic water and is now a tourist attraction, along with being an environmental disaster-in-waiting.. When we visited in 2017 the rising toxic water levels had not yet reached the stage where they were running into, and contaminating, the ground water. This was forecast to happen in 2018 and happen it did. They were ready for this and now there is a water decontamination plant that treats the overflowing water so that it does not pose a risk. All is well whilst all is well. Water fowl that land on the lake water mostly die and the tranquillity of the site is only interupted by the bangs of regular bird-scarers.
We had two nights here at the same KOA campsite that we had stayed at last time. It looked a bit different as they had expanded it quite a bit and all the small trees had grown quite a lot in the intervening 6 years. Once we were pitched we looked back at some old photos and worked out that we were one site away from our previous stay. The photos were of me bravely BBQ’ing dressed in jeans and a long sleeved top. This visit it was almost too hot to be outside. On our travels we have only stayed in the same park twice on four occasions. They are a ragtag collection of destinations: North Las Vegas; Duluth, Minnesota; Las Cruces,New Mexico and now Butte, Montana.
On our first evening here we decided to cycle ‘uptown’ for dinner. NOT a burger this time. A chinese meal. Butte is built on a hill that we were staying at the bottom of. Uptown is really downtown, but up the hill. So we got ready to go out for an early dinner then thrashed 2 miles up hill in 30°c in the lowest gears on our bikes. Butte is trying to market itself as a very ‘cycleable’ city by painting cycle lanes on the roads and putting up ‘cycle route’ signs. This is all very admirable, but it doesn’t change the hill. Needless to stay we arrived uptown very hot and sweaty and needed a pre-dinner beer to restore the body temperatures to non-hyperthermic levels.
The chinese restaurant we were headed to is historic, not only in Butte, but the whole country. Opened in 1909 it is the oldest chinese restaurant in America and having changed hands in 1911 it has been run by the same family since then. Called ‘The Pekin Noodle Parlor’ it is possibly the weirdest eatery we have been to for ages. The whole place is painted in orange and most of the tables for 4 are located in curtained booths, leaving a long runway down the centre. The waiting staff thunder up and down this corridor that connects the kitchen with the restaurant, pushing trollies covered in plates of food which clatter about but never a morsel is spilled! Eating here felt more like being in a curtained bay of a busy Emergency Dept. We settled on a ‘banquet for two’ because we couldn’t be bothered to make any decisions about what to order and considering where we were, it wasn’t half bad. (This was our second chinese meal of our Tin Can Travelling, the first being in Lemon, South Dakota in 2017. That one was fully bad, our fault!) Our journey home was a thrilling freewheel down the hill, a much more enjoyable direction of travel.
The next day, falsely informed by a tourist map that there was a good system of trails around the outskirts of the town, we put on our hiking gear, filled up the camelback with water and set off, only to find that the trails were ‘still under construction’ (ie non existant). Basically we were lied to. So dressed for the ‘wilderness’ we converted our hike into an urban ramble and looked moderately out of place as we yomped around Butte. We visited the Berkeley pit again, wandered through the old mining areas and back through the centre of the town. By mid afternoon we had covered about 8 miles in the stinking heat and were very glad to get home for a shower and flake-out. Mad dogs and Englishmen….
Butte is a town of faded glory. The mines brought incredible wealth here in the late 19th C and many of the old buildings tell a tale of the money that was here once upon a time. I suspect that it’s time of gentrification will soon be here as the cheap real estate starts to bring people here again. Watch this space.