Days 10 & 11

After a wonderful visit to Glacier, we headed back to Missoula for a three-night stay before heading over to Yellowstone. Why the three-night stay in Missoula, after previously spending two nights there before heading to Glacier? Well, Missoula is a nice place to visit. But actually we had slightly different plans in our original itinerary. 54 years ago, when I was 15, my folks took our family on vacation to a dude ranch in the Big Sky area of Montana. It was called the Nine Quarter Circle Ranch and it still exists today. Here is a picture of our family taken in 1970 on our dude ranch vacation.

I contacted them and asked if we could stop by as part of our mega RV trip. At first they were agreeable, so I built it into our itinerary. But once our dates solidified and it was determined that we would be stopping by over a weekend, they had to say no. They use the weekends to say goodbye to one week's worth of guests and welcome in the next week's worth of guests, and really can't accommodate our visit as well. Totally understandable. But by now our other surrounding reservations were made and so we just needed to decide where to stay for a few days before we could check into our RV Park at Yellowstone. Well, we enjoyed the Missoula area and the Yellowrock campground so we headed back there!

We had breakfast this morning at Ruby's Cafe in Missoula. The food and service are both very good. Our server had on a Ruby's tee shirt that said on the back: "Who Shot The Sheriff?" Well, it wasn't obvious to me what the connection was between the Bob Marley song and this restaurant, so I asked our server. It turns out that there is no connection to the Bob Marley song. Instead, an episode of "Yellowstone" had some scenes filmed in Ruby's, and the name of the episode was "Who Shot The Sheriff?" . It was the final episode of Season Four, we were told. So, for any of you that are fans of the Yellowstone TV series, you can check out Ruby's as you watch this episode!

After breakfast we headed over to the Missoula Fairgrounds where the Western Montana Fair was just finishing up. We walked around and got to look at the 4H competitors and the other exhibits. Here are some pictures: