Road Trip Diaries Day 4: Dinosaurs!!!!!

Hello! I have gotten quite behind on blogging for several reasons. 1) There have been so many awesome things to do that I just have no time to write about them. 2) I spent several days camping in Yellowstone. 3) Internet is very spotty across the middle of the USA anyhow.
So, now I am in Iowa City, but I am playing a little catch-up. Here's the story of Day 4 in Bozeman, Montana.

In A Nutshell: Overview of Day Four.

Route: Spokane, WA to Bozeman, MT.
Miles Traveled: 401 today. 1,507 total.
Hours in Car: 6 today, 26 total.
Coffee Consumed: Caitlin: 2 today, 7 cups total. Cortney: 1 today, 2 total. Combined: 9 cups.
Food Highlight of the Day: MacKenzie River Pizza Company in Bozeman. It has a huge pizza variety, absolutely perfect, springy soft crusts, and lots of options for customizing. I got a pizza with barbecue sauce, mushrooms, red onions, and black beans. The waitress seemed very enthusiastic about serving a real life vegan.
Quote of the Day: Jillian (our longtime friend in Bozeman): "Well, I did my Master's thesis on beards." Yes, she actually did.

Dinosaurs, Cowboys, and Hipsters: Welcome to Bozeman! 

    Bozeman is surprisingly awesome. I had genuinely never known much about it, but it happens to be a very convenient stop between Spokane and Yellowstone National Park. As it turns out, our high school friend Jillian moved to Bozeman exactly a day before our arrival. Perfect!
    Montana used to be big time dinosaur country, and is now home to loads of skeletons and a fantastic museum for those among them that have been dug up. So, after finding our comfy little Super 8, Caitlin and I headed to the Museum of the Rockies.

This is Big Mike, a T-Rex. 

     This museum is particularly awesome because it is tied to Montana State University and a lot of ongoing research. The displays are wonderfully informative, and also include the names of recently published papers about the dinosaurs exhibited- so that after several hours of gawking at giant dino skeletons, nerds can go find those papers and keep indulging their curiosity even further.

This scale-model skull is 6 feet wide and 9 feet long. 

   In addition to many actual bones on display, there are a lot of reconstructed dinosaurs in the museum. Now, I always knew that some dinosaurs were big, but nothing puts it in perspective like standing next to a scale-model Triceratops. They were bigger than elephants. Put a Triceratops in a room, and nobody will miss it.
    The dinosaurs alone make Bozeman a far more interesting place than I expected, but it is actually a thriving, hip city- something I did not expect in Montana. The downtown area has a lot to offer (including the aforementioned amazing pizza), and on Thursday nights the main street is closed to car traffic for an evening of live music and freedom from no-container laws. There's a great mix of people that you probably wouldn't find together anywhere else- hipsters eat next to hardcore cattle ranchers and French tourists and all sorts of other people. I was thoroughly occupied with people watching during the entirety of my long wait to get seated at the very popular MacKenzie River Pizza Company.

    Now, the rest of Montana is largely open and yellow. We drove across 500 miles of it. But it is definitely worth a visit.