this morning ryan called around 10:30 and asked if andrea and i wanted to get out of billings for a while and grab some lunch in red lodge. red lodge is a little ski resort town about 45 minutes from billings. even though it had started snowing, we checked the weather and were assured that we were only expecting about an inch in billings and 1-3 in red lodge. on top of that, it was supposed to stop snowing around noon, right about the time that we pulled out of the driveway.
as we made our way west, the snow seemed to pick up. what is usually a 45 minutes drive turned into a nearly 2 hour drive. we got to red lodge around 2, 30 minutes shy of when we were planning on being back in billings. we found a little mexican place with a saloon theme (a strange combo, i know) but it turned out to be the best mexican food we’ve had since moving to montana. it continued to snow even harder as we ate lunch. i’m pretty sure red lodge picked up the expected 1-3 in just the 50 minutes it took us to eat lunch. after completely stuffing ourselves and when it seemed like we could eat no more, we found it necessary to walk a few doors down to a local bakery and top it off with some fresh pastries.
we thought before we left that we would drive up to the ski resort since we haven’t had a chance to check it out since being out here. the road up is just a narrow, two lane, what we think to be dirt road (we couldn’t really tell from all the snow). it got a bit dicey considering there were not guardrails for most of the drive up. fortunately we were in courtney’s four wheel drive and not either one of our cars.
by the time we made it to the parking area, judging by the fact that i couldn’t see my shoes, there seemed to be about 8 inches.
we couldn’t really see beyond the parking area anyway due to the snow. so it ended up being kind of a pointless trek. we ended up making it back home around 5:30. five and a half hours and 8 inches of snow later, pretty much all we accomplished was eating a meal. but it was a darn good meal and i enjoy these occasional meaningless adventures.
