Day 6

Waking up in a bed is nice.  Sure, waking up in a forest is nice but so is waking up in a bed.  The Rainbow Motel had beds and I liked it.  

We ate the free breakfast in the motel office and spent time in the pool, as the kids may have rebelled if we didn't.  At checkout, we went over to a laundromat near a grocery store and washed clothing as we gathered provisions and ate lunch.  After the laundry was done, we went to the Museum of the Rockies.  This is the museum where the world's most famous paleontologist -- Jack Horner -- works.  It also is the museum where people take their kids who love the world's most famous paleontologist (and we take our kids, too).  It was fun to hear kids wax eloquent about the exploits of Jack Horner or at least get their geek bully on by stating in various ways that he is the most famous and they know it.  

Tallis and Ailsa went with a docent on a kid tour of The Hall of Horns and Teeth (I swear to God that's what it's called).  Anyway, the tour was all about dinosaur teeth and how you could tell what they ate from looking at the shapes of their teeth.  They passed around T. Rex and Triceratops teeth and talked about eating.  The place was called The Hall of Horns and Teeth at least in part because they have a great collection of Ttriceratops skulls (the world's largest T. Rex skull and others fossils from the mid-Cretaceous).  The Triceratops skulls were arrayed according to the maturity of the individual (from young to old) because Jack Horner was the paleontologist who most successfully argued that two types of skulls that had been considered different species were, in  fact, just juvenile and adult forms of Triceratops.  Horner also has been arguing for feathers and sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs so,in a neighboring hall, there were reconstructed dinosaurs from the early Cretaceous period with feathers that looked like some George Lucas would put in space.  Such is the stuff of fame in paleontology.  Oh, and we saw several massive fossilized egg clutches.   It really was cool.  Tallis saw the skeleton and reconstruction of a dinosaur that looked like the Loch Ness Monster, so that was cool.  Ailsa was good at finding the various frogs in the frog displays.  We didn't have time to get to the farming section (homesteading history) but, all in all, it was a nice spot (although my back hurt).  

We were at the museum long enough that we now had only enough time to drive to our campsite and eat dinner.  I think this was the first day that I realized I didn't really care what we did.  As long as we got to where we needed to be at night and everyone was happy, that would make for a great trip.  We decided on an early dinner in Bozeman followed by a trip to our next campground at the north gate of Yellowstone.  

Dinner and Beer paragraph.  We had dinner at Montana Ale Works.  Olivia suggested stopping here and I couldn't have been happier.  This was really a nice place. The menu was interesting, the food well-prepared, and the beer was lovely.  We started with buffalo potstickers and a smoked trout spread.  Both were good.  We all really liked the pot stickers.  Olivia and I both enjoyed the trout on bread.  Tallis got a bison burger (part of a large tour of alternative burger meats) and Olivia and I split a salad of local vegetables and chevre.  Why can't all restaurants be like this one?  Besides, I love restaurants with deep beer lists.  They had 40 taps and I carefully planned an assault.  However, my first choice (a Hopjuice Imperial IPA) was a hop bomb that would have destroyed my palate but I mean that in a good way.  It would have been nice but they just ran out.  I suppose that's all for the better.  I got the Blackfoot River IPA which was definitely worth drinking, although less hoppy than an imperial would have been.  I also got a Bent Nail IPA.  However, the standout was really my desert beer.  The Vlezenbeek Framboise Lambic was a wonderfully sweet beer with strong raspberry flavor.  It was exactly what I'd hoped for.  Many recent fruit beers (and there are lots of them) are nice but don't capture this same fruitiness.  I fell in love with this style of beer in the 70s going to the Wursthaus in Harvard Square where my friends and I would end our sessions with the Berliner Weisse, a white beer with raspberry syrup.  Mmmmmm.

Anyway, from there we drove down to Gardiner in time to watch the sunset.  We got all set up in an RV camp and were ready for the next day's trip into Yellowstone.  While an RV camp may not be the most romantic of locations, it was at least crowded enough that it didn't seem like a good spot for bears and there had just been a fatal bear attack somewhere in Yellowstone and why tempt fate?  We had a nice view, bathrooms, and showers.