Back To Lewistown

OK, so now we are back in Lewistown, parked again in Layne and Mari's yard. What good kids they are. The first night we were there, (after Dorothy finding yet another street vendor selling fresh veggies) we met our friends Mike and Kay Kelly from Dickinson for dinner. Kay had been in Whitefish visiting their daughter and Mike had gone to get her. We met them and went to Doc Holiday's for a drink. While there, Kay told us she really wanted to go downtown to the bar that the creek runs through. None of us had ever been to the Montana Tavern, so off we went. Barry found it with no difficulty and we strolled in, looking immediately for the running creek. Spring Creek runs right through the middle of Lewistown. Well, come to find out, the creek doesn't really run through the Montana Tavern. If you look closely there is a 4 foot box platform in one of the front corners of the bar that is covered with screen, when you look through the screen you see the creek, running UNDER the bar. You can also see some pretty hefty trout down there. The creek has been concrete lined under the town, so it is not at all what we were expecting. All in all though it was very fun. We laughed long and hard at ourselves expecting "A River Runs Through It!"
The next day Layne and Mari were able to get away for a few hours of fishing so we headed up into the Snowy Mountains for a little lake fishing. When we got to the lake, we found it to be nearly dry, with only a few small holes with fish in them, and all of these holes were in the middle of a large mud field, (what used to be the floor of the lake.) So wader clad we tromped through the mud (about mid-calf deep) to get to the fishing holes. The holes were not even a foot deep, and absolutely crammed with trout. They stock this lake every spring then every fall it drys up. Pretty sad scenario for the poor fish, but guess it is a heavily used rec. area. Anyway we each caught about 50 fish in only a little over 2 hours. The fish were very healthy, fat, and scrappy when you got them on your fly. Lots of leaches and snails so don't think they were running out of food, only water. We would catch them and move them to a channel that had a little water in it to relocate them. We knew they didn't have much time lift and felt a little bad about catching them, but not much you could do to help the little buggers. I know our purist flyfishing friends would have frowned on our activity, but it was a truly different experience.
The next morning we headed for Billings to get some business taken care of and managed to get a parking ticket! We didn't have a campground in mind in Billings, so we plugged " Fatsy Montana, our Street Pilot navagation system" in and found a lovely one. The only bad part was Fatsy sent us a route that had a fairly low bridge we had to go under, but we held our breath and made it just fine. We met our friend Bruce Posey for a brew that afternoon, then settled in for the night. Next morning it was raining, but we just held tight, it stopped about 10:00am and we made our way back to Casper to Mallorys yard where we park when we are in Casper. That is where we are now, getting the last of the house stuff done. Got a power of attorney for Kristy, our daughter-in-law and she will do the closing for us on the 28th. We went to Sundance Wed. with the last load for storage and back to Casper, yesterday the 21st. Will spend time with the kids, friends and get everything buttoned up for the house to sell, and then we plan to start for Southern Cal on Monday. Ah, the life of vagabonds.