“Long time, no see — where ya been?”
“I was on a road trip.”
“Cool! Where?”
“Montana and Wyoming.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”

I get why I get that reaction. To be honest, my main goal in visiting Montana was to cross off one of the few states on my yet-to-be-visited list. Like many others, I figured not many people live there, there must not be much to it. Hooboy, was I wrong.

My week in Montana was a lot like falling in love with a soul mate. I was wide-eyed and giddy, and also shocked that this thing of beauty was available to me and not already taken by an earlier suitor…or, you know, millions of other tourists. I have no logical explanation for why the place isn’t swarming with tourists. I guess too many people just write it off because it seems like the middle of nowhere — but that vast openness, the Big Sky, is part of Montana’s appeal. And the only way to see it is on a road trip, because if you confine your vacation to a small radius of one of the few airports or cities, you’re going to miss a lot. I’m already scanning the calendar for the right time to go back and check out a lot of the things I didn’t see this time around, like Glacier National Park. But let me tell you about what I did see and do, because it was one of the best trips of my life.

My route was a little wacky, because my trip was broken up by a weekend bridge tournament in Idaho, so you may not want to follow my exact path, but I definitely wouldn’t want to miss any of the stops I made.

Day One: Red Lodge, Montana

A road trip is what brings most travelers to Red Lodge, home to the Beartooth Highway, “the most beautiful drive in America.”  This scenic road to Yellowstone celebrates its 75th anniversary this summer, and quiet Red Lodge will be rocking throughout the summer.  Because the pass is snowed under most of the year, Red Lodge really only sees tourists in the summertime, but most of the local hotels, restaurants, and shops stay open all year, so don’t feel like you have to go when the crowds go.  Red Lodge is the kind of place you’d want to come and turn off your cell phone, laptop, and anything else that pulls you away from the moment and just be in the town.

The main street is lined with old-timey saloons that really welcome you to the West.  It’s easy to get a feel for how the miners and prospectors of the 19th century lived — the spirit of the old west is thick throughout.

I stayed at The Pollard, a beautiful historic hotel in the heart of the town.  I loved this boutique hotel, and I’ll be reviewing it in depth for About.com, so be sure to check out About Hotels to learn more about some of the historic hotels along your Montana road trip route.

Day Two: Red Lodge to Bozeman, Montana

Along the way to Bozeman is a small town called Absarokee, and a can’t-miss Montana road trip stop: Paintbrush Adventures.  This can be a two-hour stop on your road trip for a quick horseback riding experience, or you can make a whole vacation of your visit.  Paintbrush Adventures offers ranch vacations where you live, work, and play on the ranch, custom mountain pack trips including horseback riding, fishing, and camping, and drop camps, where they’ll drop you off with your supplies and pick you up when it’s time to go.  I only had time for the two-hour trail ride, and having never ridden a horse before, that was about all I could take for my first time.  Our guide was one of the ranch owners, and in addition to making sure we were comfortable on our horses, he told us all about the history of the area as we trekked along the Stillwater River and up a mountain for spectacular views of Montana’s highest peaks.

Here I am with my husband with the snowcaps behind us.  Can you tell neither one of us has been on a horse before?

The views are absolutely worth the sore legs.  You wouldn’t expect to get sore from basically just sitting, but it’s not as easy as the cowboys make it look.  Even though I had no idea how to handle a horse, my pony knew how to handle me, and it was a great, relaxing ride.

In Bozeman, we had time for two main stops: The Museum of the Rockies was first.  The rich history of this region starts long before cowboys and Indians — dinosaurs once roamed this territory, and you’ll find a great dino exhibit here.  They also have a planetarium and exhibits on Yellowstone, Native Americans, early American history, and my favorite, the frog exhibit.  Definitely a kid-friendly museum with lots to interest the grownups, too.

The second stop on our brief tour of Bozeman was Montana Ale Works, a hip brewpub where McKenzie had his first bison burger — he recommends it!  From here, we walked around downtown and I wished I could go back in time and apply to college at MSU.  It was one of the larger towns on our road trip, and I loved everything about it — large enough for an airport, all the major shopping and dining choices you’d expect in a city, and still small enough to feel cozy and friendly.

Day Three: West Yellowstone and Virginia City, Montana

On the way to West Yellowstone, there’s a short hike in Big Sky to Ousel Falls.  There’s no shortage of fantastic hikes in Montana, but this one is perfect for breaking up your time in the car.  It’s just under a mile to the falls, with only a small elevation gain on your walk, so this scenic hike should take no more than an hour, but you may want to stop and bask for a while at the falls.

In West Yellowstone, check out the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center.  A trip to the Rockies wouldn’t be complete without a bear sighting, and this is a safe place to see them up close.

From there, the road took us to Virginia City.  ”City” is a little misleading — it’s more like a one-horse town, definitely worth a visit.  The historic main street is set up like a museum of the town that was much busier a hundred years ago.  Peek in the windows of the old shops and businesses, preserved as they were a century back.  You won’t find many options for food here, but Cousin’s Candy Shop is a great place to stock up on sweets for the road.  I stayed at another historic hotel here, the Fairweather Inn, which, as the name suggests, is open mid-May through mid-September.

Day Four: Bannack State Park to Butte, Montana

Bannack State Park was probably my favorite stop on the road trip.  This is a must see, and you’re not allowed to come to my website anymore if you skip this attraction.  A gold rush town, Bannack was the first Territorial Capital of Montana.  The town thrived in the late 1800′s, but by the 1950′s, it was all but deserted.  The state then turned the ghost town into a park, and today, over 60 buildings from the gold rush days still stand, most of which are open for exploration.  Here’s a view of the town from the hillside cemetery:

From Bannack, there’s a great roadside stop on the way to Butte called Crystal Park.  For a small fee, you can dig for quartz crystals here, and you’re sure to find plenty.

The best attraction in Butte is the Dumas Brothel.  Active as a house of prostitution in Butte’s once-bustling red light district from 1890 to 1982, the Dumas Brothel is America’s longest-running whorehouse.  And now it’s a museum!  An allegedly haunted one!

Day Five: Philipsburg to Missoula, Montana

Philipsburg is where you’ll find the best souvenirs of your Montana road trip, so you don’t want to skip this stop.  First, visit the Sapphire Gallery, where you can purchase a bag of Montana mine rocks for $25 and pan for sapphires.  Don’t worry — they’ll show you how to find them, and if you come up empty, they’ll give you another bag.  I collected over eight carats of cuttable sapphires in my bag.  For an extra fee, they’ll heat treat  your gems (to bring out the color) and cut them for you so they sparkle and you can have them put in jewelry.  Mine just came in the mail yesterday and I can’t wait to make a ring out of the half-carat blue sapphire I had cut.

Next door to the Sapphire Gallery is the Sweet Palace.  Get your fill of every kind of candy imaginable here before you hit the road again.

On the way to Missoula, you can take a drive through the National Bison Range to check out the wildlife.  Get a good night’s sleep, because Missoula is a place for adventure.

Day Six: Missoula, Montana

Before you leave on your trip, secure a reservation with 10,000 Waves for a whitewater rafting trip in Missoula.  I had one…but the floods had other plans for me, and it wasn’t safe to go out on the river while I was there.  So I spent the day with the guys who would’ve guided me on the raft — instead, they gave me a tour of the town.  Again, I found myself wishing I could go back in time to apply to college at the University of Montana.  What a cool place. Kienan and Ben, our guides, took us to Out to Lunch, Downtown Missoula’s weekly performing arts festival, where we saw a local legend of sorts.  I can’t find anything online about them, but apparently the Particle Movers are local celebrities.  They believe it’s their duty to, well, move particles…something about the balance of nature or something…they apparently believe that music can wreak havoc with the particles, and so they go to wherever music is happening and help rearrange the particles…or something like that.  Ask a local — they can probably tell the story better than I can.  But sure enough, they were there, hard at work moving some invisible somethings while a live band played and local vendors sold food at the park by the river.

In the evening, take a hike up to the M overlooking the university for a breathtaking sunset.  ”Hiking the M” is one of the main tourist (and local) activities in the town.

Between river running, mountain biking, hiking, and checking out the local breweries, you’re going to need to spend a couple of days in Missoula at least.  It’s on the top of my list of places to revisit as soon as I can.

Next up, a week in Wyoming!

It’s the first day of summer, so it’s the perfect time to start thinking about road trips.  Whether you have a weekend for exploring, or a whole month to see the sights, all great road trips have the same key components:

• Great music — the road trip is one of the great themes in American music.  It’s easy to create your own vacation soundtrack.
• Great company — road trips solidify relationships.  You’ll be creating memories that will warm your heart for a lifetime.
• Funky roadside stops — it’s not a successful road trip until you’ve seen the World’s Largest Something.
• Beautiful scenery — go someplace you’ve never been before.  See the parts of the country that few people have seen.  Explore the unfamiliar.

My most recent road trip took me on a journey through America’s wild west.  I started in Montana, then went down into Wyoming through Yellowstone National Park.  Road trips are the only way to see this part of the country, because it’s so vast, and you’re doing yourself a major disservice if you just fly to Yellowstone, spend a week in the park, and head home without seeing what the surrounding areas have to offer — ghost towns, college towns, rodeo, old west saloons, breweries, haunted hotels, dinosaurs, white water adventures, and views you have to see to believe.

I’m not going to try to cram two weeks of adventure into one blog post.  I will do my best to virtually recreate my wild west road trip over my next few installments.  For now, I will share a song that should be on every road trip playlist:

My husband has around 12 years of contract delivery driving experience in Oregon.  He knows the roads here as well as anyone — he’s driven every major road in the state, most of the minor ones, and a lot of roads that most people never knew existed.  Every once in a while, we’ll go on a drive and take a detour down one such road.

This mossy service road near Oakridge, Oregon was barely marked and almost unnoticeable from the main road.  But at some point in his travels, my husband had noticed it, and wanted to show me where it led.

The Middle Willamette River fork is dammed off to form this reservoir, which we reached shortly after turning off.

We drove about 20 minutes more, followed Staley Creek down yet another service road, and found ourselves in a beautiful gorge.  McKenzie said that although he’s seen signs of human activity there (the road is paved, after all), he’s never seen another person anywhere nearby, and therefore he considers it his own.  We explored around the creek for a while.

I’ve only seen water this blue in Bermuda and in Oregon.

McKenzie remembered that he’d planted a geocache somewhere in this gorge back in 2002, and hadn’t checked on it since.  Whaddya know, we stumbled upon it while we wandered, and we were both surprised at how many visitors it has had over the past 8 years.

There were about 15 entries in the logbook, and lots of new items in the cache.  McKenzie had loaded it up with lots of items to begin with, and we’re hoping that the person that took Bridge for Dummies is enjoying the game that brought us together.  Some of the entries were from hunters who stumbled upon the cache accidentally.  A particularly amusing entry read: “I was worried it was a bomb, so I made my husband check it out.”  Most thanked McKenzie for helping them discover this lovely gorge.  We left an updated entry and went on our way.

There are places like this all over the country — some of the most beautiful spots on earth are barely known or seen by humans, even when they’re just a short trip outside a major city.  Who says there’s nothing left to discover in North America?

I’m watching a live webcast from Hilo Bay in Hawaii.  It looks ominous, but from what I’ve heard from friends in Hawaii, everyone near the shores has been evacuated.

If you want to follow along, watch here.

According to Twitter updates under the #hitsunami tag, whales have disappeared from Kawaihae Harbor.  They seem to know something.

Here’s hoping it’s not as bad as Hawaii is preparing for.

Posting has been light here on Jianantonic.com for the past few days — I’ve been doing my best to take advantage of the incredible weather we’re getting in the Pacific Northwest, and I’ve got company in town to share it with.  I’ll be posting some updates soon, but I wanted to put this photo up here.  I’m in a hotel in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River from Portland, and we have a magnificent view of Mount Hood right out our window.  The windows here open, but only just a smidge, so I held my camera out to get a photo.  I couldn’t see the display on the camera at all, so I had no idea if the mountain was properly framed — I just took my best guess and clicked.  That bird, which appears to be a bald eagle, had amazing timing.

When that little groundhog told us we were in for a long winter, was anyone prepared for all the snow, snow, and more snow that’s been falling?  Everyone dreams of a white Christmas, but come mid-February, we’re back to dreaming of flowers blossoming, green trees, and warm rays of sunlight, right?  It might be a while before you see any of that at home, but it’s all waiting for you at Grand Cayman island in the Caribbean Sea.  The Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman is offering a special Stingray Splash vacation package with a complimentary fifth night at the luxury hotel.

The package includes accommodations at the Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman, a trip for two to Stingray City, and a free fifth night of your vacation.  What is this Stingray City?  According to ocean explorer and preservationist Jean-Michel Cousteau, it is one of the best snorkeling sites in the world.  To get there, you’ll board the Intrepid motor yacht at the resort’s dock with a group of no more than 8 total visitors.  It’s a 15-minute boat ride to the shallow sandbar in Cayman’s North sound known as Stingray City.

In crystal clear, 3-foot-deep waters, guests can snorkel, play with and feed the gentle stingrays which are accustomed to human visitors.

When you’re not communing with friendly rays, there’s plenty more to enjoy at the Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman:  Silver Rain, a La Prairie Spa, Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ambassadors of the Environment family program, Blue Tip, a 9-hole golf course designed by Greg Norman, and of course all the fine dining options you’d expect at any Ritz-Carlton property.

The Stingray Splash package starts at $609 per night for the high season.  Visit www.ritzcarlton.com for reservations and more information.

I don’t do much driving around here because I’d much rather spend my time looking out the window, at things other than the road.  On our drive back to Portland from northern California, there were some magnificent views of Mt. Shasta from I-5.

I love the lenticular clouds that form above the mountain peaks here.  We didn’t have those on the east coast.  The clouds on top of Shasta were in constant motion; the mountain looked like a bubbling cauldron.  It was spectacular.

Next to Mt. Shasta is Black Butte.  Here’s a family photo of the two of them.

Black Butte is much more impressive when you don’t compare it to a 14,179′ tall mountain.

From this point on I-5, the weather was clear enough that we could faintly see Mt. McLoughlin in Oregon, but I couldn’t capture it on my cheap digital camera.  Of course the clouds rolled in as we got closer, so I wasn’t able to get a good shot of any of the Oregon Cascades on this drive, but there was one more photo-op once we crossed state lines.  This is Table Rock just outside of Ashland, Oregon.

I took all of these pictures from our moving Subaru on Interstate 5, on January 11, 2010.