Tracey:
Today we said farewell to Montana. But before we left Bozeman we had one more tasty meal; we got a tip from a girl working at the Ale House last night regarding the best breakfast places and she didn’t steer us wrong. As we walked the few blocks to get there we picked up a group of folks from South Dakota who own a B&B near the Black Hills and spend the winters RVing south. They were looking for a good place to eat and tagged along with us; they tried to get us to join them for breakfast but table space was at a premium on a rainy Sunday morning. So we took the little table that was available and left them to their own company. A new rule for choosing restaurants while on the road: if they serve breakfast and have “Cat” anywhere in the name, it’s a good bet (and this is coming from avowed dog people). Two Cats in Bar Harbor was phenomenal and Cat Eye in Bozeman was just as good. We told the waitress that we’d been on the road for weeks and it was one of the best breakfasts we’d had; she passed it on to the cook who let out a big whoop and gave us thumbs up from the kitchen.
Then the long haul across the state, through Wyoming and into South Dakota. Muted shades of green and gray and yellow as far as the eye can see. One surprise has been how hilly the prairie is. Lots of contour, tawny grass and sage brush and nothing else (except wind - it‘s fairly constant out here and we’ve had a few 50+ mph days). Another surprise has been the ugliness of almost every area of human habitation. Montana and Wyoming are both studies in contrast -- gorgeous mountainous wild regions vs. drab, monotonous plains. The plains are unappealing enough on their own (after the first couple of miles anyway), but to make it worse, these sons of miners and cowboys and pioneers have survival and practicality hard-wired into them and beautification just doesn‘t enter into the equation. It’s all warehouses and aluminum buildings, heavy equipment and farm implements, oil refineries and stockyards. The houses and numerous trailers are purely functional and almost always surrounded by falling-down sheds, at least one ancient RV or/or boat, several cars or trucks waiting to be cannibalized for parts, and lots of junk (the very nice tree-lined neighborhoods seen in Missoula, Bozeman, Kalispell and Whitefish are the exceptions).
Tonight we’re in Deadwood, SD, which is an odd mix of gambling and history; the casinos have paid for the historic renovation (to the tune of $170 million), but it’s an uneasy marriage. The brick-paved streets and refurbished old hotels and saloons look great from a distance, but as you get closer you see that they’re filled with garish lights, slot machines, and lots of cigarette smoke. And gambling is truly the only game in town, as we discovered while trying to find a place to get a decent meal (defined as one which didn’t include an all-you-can-eat buffet). We ended up in the Deadwood Social Club, upstairs from the Saloon No. 10 where Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed. Slightly shabby, filled with old photos of the town and its inhabitants back in the day, it served surprisingly good Northern Italian food. While the only dessert option is cheesecake, they offer over a dozen varieties (everything from coconut-almond to banana chocolate chip), all made from scratch by one of the owners. The milk chocolate walnut was the waiter’s favorite and after one bite we understood why.
