Right on the heals of coming home from our California trip we were offered the opportunity to visit Montana. Of course we jumped on the chance, we love to visit our friends there.

After our not so fun trip through the mountains in California that took way tooooooo long we decided to take the more or less straight highway route to Montana. Because of this we didn’t go through Missoula and missed visiting our friends there, which was a real bummer, but it saved us hours and twisty turny mountain roads.

We got to Montana and our friend Gil; who so graciously offered his spare room for us right when Google predicted we would, it was awesome.  Something that wasn’t awesome, I was having such a good time with some of our friends I neglected to take pictures of some of the more fun times that we had, I guess having the fun is the best, but I miss the pictures. I only took 700some pictures during this trip and that may sound like a whole lot, but remember most of them are out of focus or bad in some other way. Anyway we had a  wonderful time and even though as per usual this series of posts is late, it’s better than never.

On the drive to Montana we stopped in Kennewick, WA at a little park and had lunch and then played on the swings for a little bit.

Ah, the Flathead Valley in Montana. Beautiful, usually green, but still beautiful.

Our first view of Flathead Lake, which is ginormous and beautiful and always signals the last stretch of our journey.

Our first morning in Montana we went to the Buffalo Cafe in Whitefish. One of our favorite places to eat and not just because our friend (Waldo’s BFF and hetro-life-mate) Jack is the main cook there. The food is super delicious and it’s a piece of Whitefish history or at least a must see there.

After breakfast and a tiny bit of Whitefish sight seeing we went to visit our friend Becky. Becky is all about lego’s and so she and Lily built all afternoon.

That first day was jam packed. After leaving Becky’s we went to Anthony and Maggie’s and Lily was introduced to the love of the Xbox Kinect. Lily and Anthony and Maggie’s son Conrad played and played and had a blast.

The next day which I believe was Tuesday we went back to Becky’s and after hanging out and trying in vain to decided where to go for lunch for I’m not kidding you at least an hour we hopped in our car and finally decided to go eat where Becky works. We hadn’t been there before, but it’s well spoke of by Becky (of course) and has great reviews on Trip Advisor. We had fancy bacon and brie cheese burgers and they were the Yum. After lunch we went for ice cream at a local place that makes all their own ice cream and it was so good we went there again a few days later.

Lily kept talking about playing with Conrad and his video game, it was cute. We had planned to visit Anthony and Maggie again anyway so back we went.

Conrad liked the dog guitar that we bought Lily.

The next day was work day. Well since we work from home, everyday is a work day even on vacation. While on vacation is just usually a short day, but since we were in the town where our office is we had to make an appearance, which we would have done anyway to say Hi, but meetings were planned. For me this office time was only an hour or two, but for Waldo it was a full day event.

Lily and I spent the day with Becky while Waldo worked. I totally got the better gig. We had lunch together and checked out the thrift stores; which I was bummed to not find anything good, but Becky found an almost complete Lego Yoda for $5 so she was jazzed.

We left Becky and went to the park before picking Waldo up. I really wish I had thought that plan though a little because it was like 101 and that park had little to no shade so everything was HOT! We checked out a few of the pieced of play equipment, but left after less than 10 minutes.

It looks like she’s having fun, but only because this particular thing has the metal covered with cloth so it was only a little hot.

After picking up Waldo we went to dinner and they had this really cool moose outside.

This is the end of part 1 of the Montana trip. Stay tuned for some fun.