Retirement Road Trip 2011: Day 9, Saturday 9/3

32 miles on my truck, still camped at Osen's RV Campground.

Yikes, there was frost on the grass and on the car windows this morning!!

Today's activities fell into two completely different parts.  Part one was a morning trip to the mountains.  Part two was a long afternoon road trip searching out fishing spots.

Dave and Ann have longtime friends from Wisconsin, Dennis and Gayle.  Dennis is a carpenter and craftsman.  Over the years he discovered a piece of property, advised and help build a cabin for a millionaire.  The challenge is that the camp is high in the Montana mountains on a gravel forest service access that that is suitable for four wheel drive vehicles only.  For some time, Dave and Ann have spent some vacation time at the cabin, along with Dennis and Gayle.

Long story short, I was invited to join the crew for breakfast this morning.  The cabin is located only about 15 miles from where I am camped, but the drive took over an hour.  That gives you an idea of the road conditions.

The cabin has electricity, but no water. Water has to be trucked in from a natural spring about a mile away.  Actually, the cabin is located on a development of about 70 lots, where each lot is 20 acres.  Two lots make up the property for this cabin.  It is constructed in traditional log (real logs, not milled logs) style.  The views are phenomenal.

I guess that is why they build them here.  However, it is not livable in year round because of the heavy snow fall making the roads impassable for weeks at a time.  While the weather was perfect today, it can be extremely windy with sometimes the 30 mile per hour winds blowing for several day steady.  Also, because of the remoteness, you can not buy fire insurance.  So you better have a deep checkbook.  All in all, a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.  :-)

Time for fishing, or at least trying.  Between Dennis, Gayle, Ann, Dave, myself and two dogs, we ended up taking two vehicles.  Dave and Dennis drove.  I rode shotgun for Dave.  We had limited maps, but I had along my iPad and the mapping system on it proved invaluable.  Dave is a fishaholic.  He can not go by a spot of river without stopping to look.  We checked out three rivers; The Gallatin, the Jefferson, and the Madison.  All three are west of us, toward Bozeman.  We left the campground about noon.  We arrived back at the campground about 10:00 PM.

Let me summarize it this way.  Three guys trying to catch fish drove two cars over 250 miles each, spend almost nine hours on the road, and caught ONE fish!!  And the one fish wasn't even mine.  However, over those nine hours I saw some very beautiful country.  So if you look at it as a road trip and not a fishing trip, it was a huge success.  Its all a matter of spin, as the politicians would say.  I saw huge wheat fields, beautiful irrigated alfalfa fields, gorgeous mountain canyons and sweeping vistas.

I had a great day.  We topped it off with an excellent dinner at The Sport, a restaurant in Livingston.

Sunday I'm driving down in to Yellowstone National Park.

All for now.........