Dillon, Montana

Jan 8, 2007

Current mood:cheerful

Dillon, Montana 

I LOVE Dillon!!! Tucked away in the southern Montana mountains, I discovered a heavenly haven in what I initially thought was only a really cool truck stop when I made a 24 hour trip from Coeur d'Alene to Mesa, Arizona a few years ago for one of our church's missionaries wedding. It's the first stop after leaving CDA that you feel like you want to get out of the car for a minute to check the oil, wash the windshields, fill up on gas, check the Rand McNally road map to see what great time you've made so far and grab some road snacks.

When my girlfriend, Heather, and I moved to Snowmass Village in November of 2004, this was our favorite place to pit stop on our bi-monthly road trips back home. The Shell station was our personal landmark to load up on Red Bull and sunflower seeds when we would drive straight through. It's here where I hit my first deer at 75mph in the middle of the night with my Chevy Lumina. He was okay. He just did a double flip, landed on his feet and ran away into the night.

 

Roman, Jordan and I drove into Dillon with the car lurching like it had been for the last hour. Roman oblivious to it all as he had been crashed out snoring away in the backseat for the last hundred miles or so. Jordan had been in the seat directly behind me whispering the same prayer over and over for Heavenly Father to get us safely out of the middle of nowhere. As soon as he saw town lights he woke up Roman to let him know that God answered prayers!

We drove past the familiar gas station/casino/restaurant that I know so well and headed down the main street looking for mechanic signs. I had never ventured any further than the gas station and as we drove down each street, I was pleasantly surprised at the ambiance this little town radiated. Not finding any signs anywhere, we pulled in across from the train station at city park and walked across the street to a find a place to eat. We came upon a little place that looked like an old time saloon, called Blacktail Station. It had two doors, one to the tavern and another that had large wide stairs covered in a rich, dark blood red carpet that led to a basement restaurant.  From the outside, in the setting dusk, it looked like real life cowboys would hang out there, so at that mere thought, the boys wanted to eat here.

We walked down the stairs and entered a small warm cozy bar and restaurant with white linen tablecloths. Western watercolor pictures decorated the walls along with over-sized smoky mirrors and dimly lit overhead lighting. It was late on a Sunday night and the only other hungry people in Dillon were a couple in the back corner. We were seated in a king's throne booth with enough silver on the table to warrant royalty. We were starving!! I think we ordered everything we saw, jumbo prawn cocktail for all of us, a bowl of the best French Onion soup that I have ever had, two pounds of steamed King Crab legs, and a nice juicy center cut, medium rare sirloin steak. I was full after the soup, yet managed to get one of the crab legs in as well before the boys took it over.

Mac's Last Cast

Our server was a dark haired version of Everyone Loves Raymond's mother. Her name was Boots. And she was adorable. She sat down at the table across from us and found out why we were in town. Within minutes she had a list for us of the place we needed to stay the night at, two car mechanics names and phone numbers, one foreign car mechanic in Butte, and the name of where we should have breakfast in the morning. She gave us a brief history of the town and called over this big stoic man to get in on the conversation as well. She told us that her husband and she would drive the five hours to CDA to see their families twice a year for the last 30 but that she would place her heart nowhere else but Dillon. Boots and her husband owned the restaurant and her daughter owned Mac's Last Cast which was a tavern upstairs that had the largest stuffed fish living on the walls that I had seen outside of Alaska. The boys and I sat there for hours, taken away by her stories and her warm animation. She told us that Dillon was home of The Great Harvest bread company and to a nursing college where the college kids would head over to Mystery Peak, about an hour west, to go skiing on some of the best powder in all of Montana and the best kept secret so it was never too crowded. And that Dillon was Denver's little sister being the "Other Mile High City" which sits only 20 feet lower than Denver. We left with our bellies full and ready to crawl into our pillow soft hotel beds,  under the cozy down blankets at the Guest House Inn to drift off to never never land.

We slept like rocks, and this time I did not even entertain the remote possibility of having lunch with Gerda, I was reluctantly hoping we would be there for dinner at the earliest. I went to check out at the lobby desk and overheard the girl in front of me saying that she was from Seattle. I told her that was where we were heading. She said that she actually wasn't from Seattle but a little town across Puget Sound on the Olympic Peninsula called Port Townsend. In the excitement of the serendipity, I said that we were from Port Townsend too!!!  Turns out we knew all the same people, lived there the same years, ran in the same circle of friends, but had never met each other until some random moment in the middle of a blizzard in a small, itty bitty town in southwest Montana!

We found our mechanic and he quickly got us on the road again with the promise that we should make it to Seattle without any other issues. As we traveled through Montana, I had forgotten how beautiful it was in the wintertime as I have always traveled its highways and biways in the dark. J A River Runs Through It was filmed not far from here, just west of Missoula along the Clark Fork River. This river also runs out of Northern Idaho, about sixty miles north of Coeur d'Alene near the Canadian border. It is renowned for it's fly-fishing and is the second home of Viggo Mortenson from The Lord of the Rings. I have heard the stories of his friend's birthdays, Orlando Bloom and others from the movie, meet up at the little one street town to hit the bars that leave lasting impressions. I think he found this magical little place through his friend Sean Astin, Patty Duke's son who was also in the movie. They live in Coeur d'Alene along with John Travolta's sister, Ellen, who directs the theatre program at the college next to the resort, where Tito's is also at and our unwavering destination for the day.

Roman and the pizza he made with Gerda standing behind him!

Chef Jordan and his black olive and ham pizza!

At 3:00, we rounded the highway on the north side of the lake and straight into downtown to arrive just in time before Gerda's departure. She is the same. Can't understand a word she says as she hovers above us to make sure that the soup hits the spots it always has. Finally, Heather arrives as our second helping is coming out and it's like a reunion as all three of us haven't been in the same room together since the night before we left for Aspen years ago. I miss her. I miss Heather. I miss this place. I miss Simon.