Wednesday, May 25

Salmon Trip, Day 2: Missoula, MT

(This is a travelog of my adventures at Kelly and Caleb's wedding.
Link to Salmon Trip, Day 1; Salmon Trip, Day 3; and Salmon Trip, Day 4).

The next day, Tyler, Noel, and I went to Missoula because Tyler and I had never set foot in Montana. Dirty minded people that we are, one of the first things we noticed about Montana besides the high number of casinos and personalized license plates was the number of things with suggestive names. There’s the Kum and Go convenience store and the Town Pump convenience store, which has signs warning that you’ll lose your license if you’re caught in a “pump and run,” (gas ‘n go to us Idahoans), and several others, including a daycare called Wiggles and Giggles. The trend of naming daycares with yucky-sounding names is nothing novel, though, as there is currently an ad for a daycare called “Tugs-n-Hugs” in the breakroom at my job.

Also, there’s a town and a mountain range called Lolo, which sounds disgusting to me for several reasons which I’ll not enumerate here. One good thing, I guess, is that the casinos advertise themselves as “Montana’s most liberal casino” rather than saying they have the “loosest slots” like the ones in Reno. We wandered around a bit in downtown Missoula, and went to Butterfly Herbs despite Noel’s protests that the name is stupid. After that we went to across the street to a store specializing in old and rare books where there lives the sweetest old doggie ever and we all petted her. I was surprised to find a collection that I swear was stolen directly from my preteen self. They had Sweet Valley Twins, The Babysitters Club, The Fabulous Five, and The Sleepover Friends collections, all in the original editions with the same artwork as when I read them in fifth and sixth grade before discovering Stephen King and Dean Koontz. After passing the annoyingly named Junga Juice, (which will later be opening a store in Bodo), we stopped in a secondhand store called the Loose Moose. Noel and I went to rescue her car from potential parking tickets while Tyler flirted with the cute shop boy. Later, we went to a place called the Raven CafĂ©, which serves up something called The Raven Burger (not made of raven meat, they promise), and listened to the jukebox whilst drinking beer and watching a near hurricane outside.

We met Noel’s brother for dinner at the OPP, or Old Post Pub, where I had a really good portabella mushroom, roasted red pepper, and gouda sandwich and my new favorite food, beer cheese soup. After that we left Missoula and headed back to Salmon to have a powwow at Tee-Pee Island.


However, just before we headed out the door with our booze, Noel discovered the A&E Biography of Johnny Depp, which we stayed and watched. We spent the remainder of the evening hanging out in the tipi, and retired at 3:30 am.

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