Bill & Jan's Excellent Adventure: And Just Like That, Our 3 Weeks in Ennis are Over

I wish I could report that our fishing just got better and better, but oh no. I caught one small fish in all the days we fished and we fished a bunch, the only thing that made us feel a little bit better was that everyone we talked to wasn't doing any better. No idea why this year is so poor. Oh well it still is really beautiful peacefully fishing a gorgeous river with incredible views all around.

Just to prove I cook once in a while, here's my scallop provencal over grits with peas. Turned our pretty good.

We are really happy to report that the smoke was only here a couple days in all, most of the time it was clear, clear, clear, which even made talking on the phone amazing.

We tried 2 more restaurants in Ennis for lunch, and we can now confidently say in our opinion there are really no good restaurants in this town, at least that we have found. Too bad too, since it is growing so much, building everywhere, with tons of visitors, the need is real. But Jan nailed it with a wonderful Thai chicken salad.

So with our addiction to going out for lunch all over, we have made numerous sorties to Bozeman to get our fixes, and to hit a larger grocery store. But on one of the drives back to Ennis in a driving rain storm we caught a rock and broke our windshield on the truck, yet another thing to get taken care of.

We tried another sushi place in Bozeman which was pretty good, but not better than our favorite, Dave's.

We have had a spotting scope for a long, long time. We use it quite often and especially in Yellowstone. We have over the years seen adapters to allow use with a iPhone and have never gotten one, since we are planning on a visit later this year we started looking into it. We found a company called Phone Skope that specializes in the adapters and ordered a kit to be able to try it out here in Ennis before getting to YNP. It's still new but it is a simple adapter, easy to affix and use, so along with a remote shutter, it looks like a winner. We need to work with it more but our first try was pretty good, this heron is perhaps 500 yards away.

Jan hit it out of the park again with this spicy beef with broccoli, made with flankens.

We've had the usual gamut of weather, storms, WIND, and nice.

We decided after the disappointing sushi, we needed to back to Dave's for redemption, and we did, delicious!

We have had an increasing noise from the right side of the truck's engine for some time. When we were in Buffalo we asked Jason what he thought and he told us there is a fairly common problem on our year truck with the exhaust manifold cracking, and he added that if we wanted to get it fixed we'd better try to make a appointment ASAP, as things are ridiculously backed up. Wow, news to us. So after I tried to get an appointment in Bozeman, no dice, 2 months out, tried Missoula, same. But it was recommended to us to try a smaller dealer in Livingston, which we did and got an appt in only 2 weeks. Very friendly and knowledgable on the phone, only ding was it is a 85 mile drive one way from Ennis, but in Montana that's just over the hill:-) So off I went at 0610am for my 0800am appt. Beautiful drive!

I walked up the street for a great down home breakfast and less than 3 hours later I was on my way.

We had a humdinger of a thunderstorm tear through, even with all the wind we were able to hunker in next to the motorhome to avoid the rain and still enjoyed our drinks and cigars, and right after we were treated to this display!

But when we did go back in we found our ceiling, right above the driver and passenger seats, was leaking like a sieve. Quite a surprise, after all we have had more rain this year than ever before with no problems. So nothing we could do at that point, and it had stopped raining so we had a nice halibut dinner.

Tried to figure where it could be coming from and the only hole in the roof anywhere near there is where the wires to and from our satellite dish go through. We didn't notice anything bad when we painted the roof, but figured it couldn't be coming from anywhere else. Since things were still wet on the roof from our rain, we decided to go over and try fishing again, and on the way we were surprised by 2 bull moose crossing the road in front of us, one really big. The light was wrong and we couldn't get too close, but you get the idea from the one pic we got.

Another bust of a day fishing so when we got back, we went up on the roof, pulled the old cover up, cleaned up the old caulk, installed a new cover with copious amounts of caulk, so we will see what we will see, but we are calling it fixed:-)