Visitation from another world

Susan and Jason came up to visit for a couple days to see what Montana looks like when it's cold and rainy. Just as they suspected, it was cold and wet. But not to leave any stone unturned, we four-wheeled over 25 miles just to make sure.

We headed up to Garnet ghost town and then on to the ghost town of Coloma. Back in the early days of Montana (about 1898) there was a gold boom and these little towns sprung up overnight. Many of the ghost towns in the US are because they were all mining towns, and as soon as they became unprofitable they closed down shop. Now you can visit them and wonder who lived there the last 110 years. Garnet has been preserved over the years by the BLM, but Coloma is slowly falling apart. Maybe they wouldn't have turned into ghost towns if 90% of their businesses weren't saloons (Garnet had 13 saloons!). You can't keep getting the entire town drunk and then send them off into the mountains to blast mines. Eventually you're gunna start losing people. While they didn't keep up with the repair on the houses in Coloma, they did keep on top their horoscopes. We found a piece of newspaper from May 21, 1956. It had our horoscopes AND an ad for two new pairs of pants for $.99! What is really crazy is that we were there May 22, 2008! And for those of you who don't know the math, that's almost EXACTLY 52 years later.

After we toured with the ATVs we tried to figure out what else to do. We didn't have enough people for paintball, the river was flowing at 11,000 CFS so we couldn't raft it (they closed it), hiking in the rain didn't sound fun, neither did biking or anything else outdoors. So, we chased some dessert down in Seeley and the next day after returning to the ghost towns we went to Missoula to see Indiana Jones!!! I'll just tell ya now that Harrison Ford is the hottest 65 year old I've ever seen :) I loved those movies so much and this one was just as good as the rest. On a scale of 1-10, it was an 11. ...Jason did notice one thing that made us all go, heeeeeeeey... didn't Henry Sr. and his son drink that water from the immortal fountain? So how did he die, or why wasn't he in this movie? That Sean Connery...

And just because I wanted to put this picture in...

Where, you might ask, in our tiny living space did Susan and Jason sleep? They slept on the air mattress of course! No finer amenity could be offered at the junction than to stay on the still-fairly-new air mattress with the pin-sized hole in it. They dubbed it the "love" mattress cause by morning you find yourselves stuck in the middle of it together and no way out.