Day 7, July 15

   We left Billings and first stop Bozeman, MT for the Museum of the Rockies. Nice place - lots of history of the Rockies. Didn't know how many dinosaurs roamed the area and how many of their fossils have been excavated. We watched a 3D show in the planetarium on the northern lights and we fell asleep again - it's becoming a habit. There was a great outdoor living history of an old homestead farmhouse. There are volunteers there pretty much all the time - they dress like the 1890s and run the place as if they are living then. We watched women working in the kitchen, a blacksmith, etc. Pee Wee made himself comfortable with a woman spinning clothes - they sat on the back porch and talked and talked like they had been friends forever. The picture of me and the flowers is next to a perfect garden in the front of the house. The picture of Pee Wee is when we were playing around with the two holer in the back yard. We thought it was a model of one until we realized the women working in the house needed it.
   From there we travelled to Butte, MT and toured the World Mining Museum. Butte is famous for being such an important mining town through the years. After our tour we had a real appreciation of how hard those men had it as they worked underground in terrible conditions. Before we arrived at the museum, we did a good deed, kind of a sad one. We saw a poor old lady on a corner in Butte with a sign saying "I need help!" We drove past her as everyone generally does, then thought about it, went to a nearby grocery store, bought a sandwich and a drink, and drove back to the corner and handed it to her. She thanked us, but the sadness in her eyes was still present.
   Then we finally made it out of Montana and ended up in Idaho Falls, Idaho where we are staying right next to the falls. The falls aren't high, but they spread out over 100 yards and they are loud - we can hear them from our room. I'm looking forward to seeing them in the morning. The hotel manager is a college student here in town and is from Eatonton, GA. We talked to her for a while - she isn't at all happy here and is hoping to go back to Georgia. She really opened up with us, and she really isn't happy. Maybe the chocolate pie and good deed doers card we brought her back after eating tonight will cheer her up a little.
    Before we made it to Idaho Falls we stopped in Lima, Montana just for the heck of it. Lima is like so many towns we see in this part of the country. A few hundred people, tiny school for all the grades, dirt roads except for one paved road, and the kind of place we enjoy looking around in. The last picture is in Lima, and it's for real - they are real buildings in use and not restored from pioneer days. We got a copy of the town newspaper, which was local news on two folded pieces of paper that had been run through a copy machine. We learned a little - I bet nobody knows that this is White History Month. Never heard of a white history month. It doesn't surprise us that Montana has a white history month - only four tenths of one percent of the residents in Montana are black. Montana is a beautiful state but I need a little more diversity than that.
    Just a few more days of our trip - not sure where we're going tomorrow, but probably not too much farther from our airport in Denver.