Travel in the time of COVID – One Night in Butte, Montana – 7/5/2020

I’ve had a few “escape plans” in my life, for life in general. That probably sounds weird to most of you, but let’s call it a symptom of Wanderlust as much as anything. Someday, I’ve said to myself, I just want to sell everything I own, pack my car with the essentials, and head for a horizon, any horizon.

 

That has changed a few times since I was a teenager. Sometimes it’s wanting a boat to sail away on (one big enough for a month or two at sea), sometimes it’s twenty-thousand in cash and my passport… you know… just ready to go (still working on the cash bit… ha!), and sometimes it’s the idea of buying 20-acres somewhere remote and going full hobo/hermit. But more and more with the world today I find the appeal of this “escape” is growing. For those that don’t know, my primary source of income is a tech company that recently announced work-from-home due to the Corona virus through January, 2021.

 

This seems like a dream come true then, right? That’s an open ticket to travel in my eyes. Sure, with the pandemic ongoing this means I’ll have to be careful where I travel, how I travel, and what my potential points of exposure are… but if anything this blog has been a tribute to the idea that I am a risk-taker. Without getting too political I believe that life is something to be lived… and that sometimes means things like planning a cross-country road trip in the middle of a global crisis in hopes of escaping to new experiences, better opportunities, and maybe even somewhere with less closures/cancellations due to the risks involved for everyone. I thought Butte, Montana (MT) seemed like the perfect place for this for a number of reasons.

 

 

So… with thoughts that maybe I could travel far enough to avoid COVID closures and restrictions… I packed my car. I even brought my work stuff. I was on vacation for 10 days… but you know what? Maybe I’d stay out longer. Who knows! I don’t technically have to “be somewhere” until next year in January! I packed for eight days… and over the next 24-hours I found out I really only needed two changes of clothes.

 

Butte is a 12-hour drive from Denver, pretty much straight North and then straight West (mostly). I had a few parcels of land I wanted to look into, and left early in the morning on Sunday to make the drive all in one day. It was long, really long, but with good music and a sense of determination I stopped about every three hours to stretch my legs, use the restroom, and generally take a break from the driving. Around noon, I grabbed lunch in Casper, WY. I drove around for a while looking for gas, and ended up finding the Wyoming Ale Works!

 

 

I had a great lunch, though I did hurry because I was aiming to be in Butte by 8PM that evening, and enjoyed a hummus dip, salad, and grilled shrimp that was very filling! Back in the car, I pointed the car North again, and headed off again.

 

 

The drive, I think, was my favorite part of the trip. More than once, the beautiful views of Northern Wyoming and the skies of Wyoming were enough to make me smile at the splendor of it all. I see now why they call it “Big Sky” (in general, not the city!)… it is absolutely stunning.

 

 

 

I arrived in Butte on schedule, and checked into my hotel. I’ll be honest, I decided the 12-hour day of driving was a LOT of driving, and went straight to bed. I’d stopped for fast food somewhere along the way close to the hotel, and my only worry was what to do first the next day. I should preface that everything to follow from this point forward is going to sound like a downer… and for someone who was hoping for an escape… that’s exactly what it was. I can’t stress enough here that generally, in life, I feel very lucky to live the life I live, and many are going to be minor inconveniences, but with the mood I was in at the beginning of the trip… it all added up pretty quickly. I’d wanted an escape, not a reminder in every moment of my day, from COVID.

 

 

 

Breakfast at the hotel was planned in advance, having left a check-list with the front desk the night before… a meal was left out for me to come and pick up in the lobby. The hotel where I stayed did a good job, everything considered, but seeing my breakfast (that I normally enjoy from this particular hotel) put in separate Styrofoam pockets was disheartening. A slice of toast, eggs, and little circle of ham somehow felt like a consolation breakfast. It wasn’t “too small” or “not enough”, and I really don’t fault the hotel for putting forth an effort to still service guests… but it was my first reminder of the day that Butte was not immune to the global pandemic. Online, I had tried to find other places to have breakfast while lying in bed the night before… but most were closed as early as I woke up, or had curbside pickup only, etc.. Nothing sounded appealing, and since I was already planning to walk around the historic districts of Butte and take pictures, and I couldn’t wait to get out and take some photos, I elected to just get right to it and skip any further diner plans for now.

I parked in the “historic downtown” area, surprised at the steep streets in an area with such harsh winters, and marveled at the older, brick buildings in town. Some though, I noticed, were boarded up. It would become a theme as I meandered through town. Butte was established back in the 1860’s as a mining camp before expanding outward, and this is very evident in the architecture and signage. It was great to walk around and see some of it!

 

 

After a good few miles walking around and grabbing photos, I circled around and fired up the car to head West. About ten miles outside of town… there were some 20-acre plots of land just off the highway that I had found on Zillow and wanted to check out. It’s hard to believe the views that were online: mountain views, rolling hills, farm land and open space galore. As I walked along the road where the land connected on one side… I realized those views were exactly what you would receive if you bought the parcel. This is true in most of Montana, at least along my drive west from Bozeman. These kinds of views went on for at least five (driving) hours. It’s just rolling hillside after rolling hillside… and it was breathtaking all the way around.

 

 

Trying to drive around the land as much as I could, I discovered a small trailhead just where a train went under the road, and went out for another mile or two of walking while I took more pictures. With some odd lighting, only a few of the photos turned out, but the walk was worth it. I climbed back in the car, thinking I’d go find lunch at a local place in Butte before heading to the “Grizzly Encounter” where I planned to try to meet some grizzly bears (“safely”). I got back to the hotel, dropped off some of my camera gear, and just happened to check online before heading out to the Grizzly Encounter and saw that they’re essentially “by appointment only” right now and they’re closed later in the week. I could try to drive over to the place quickly and see if I could get in shortly before they closed for the day… but more than likely I wouldn’t make it. And I likely wouldn’t make it later in the week, either given the shortened hours and closures.

 

Slightly deflated, I resigned myself to not seeing the grizzlies, and headed down to get a suggestion for lunch from the hotel front desk. I asked if the woman at the front desk knew a good diner where I could get lunch and maybe breakfast for lunch. She smiled at me, and said the casino next door was open and also served food.

“No”, I said, “I don’t want to sit at a keno machine and eat… aren’t there any diners in town?”

 

 

“Well,” she thought about it, “there’s a Perkins! The Denny’s closed…”. She would go on to tell me that many of the diners and restaurants that were still open post-COVID closures didn’t bother to open on Mondays right now… there just wasn’t enough business to justify staffing. And for some reason… that was the last straw for me.

 

 

 

I could have tried harder. I could have found something, I suppose. But you know what? I was done. It was 1PM in Butte, MT, and I was paying $150 a night at a hotel to sit at that hotel with nothing to do.

 

Maybe the whole trip was a farce, maybe I’d been trying to run away from the idea of COVID. Maybe it’s the fact that travel has defined who I am for such a long time that having it stripped from me due to this has been infuriating in ways I cannot express with words. Maybe I had just felt trapped, defeated, stuck… and maybe I was finding that in Butte I was just as trapped, just as defeated, just as stuck. When you’ve spent so long defining your life by how much you can travel and all the crazy things you can do… being blocked at every turn isn’t just disappointing, it’s heart-wrenching. Add to that the fact that I’m trying to build savings to buy a house… and I felt like I was just wasting money for zero gain.

 

 

So… I packed up. I went straight to my room and cleared out my stuff. I was headed back to Casper, I was cutting it short. It was time to go home and forget I’d tried this… at least for now.

 

Casper was seven hours away, Denver another five the next morning after another night in a hotel where I just refused to order breakfast to avoid being disappointed again… and then just as suddenly as I had decided to leave… I was back home. Oddly, it worked out, my work sprung a bridge call on me and I got to meet with a leader over my group a few levels above my boss… and it was likely very good for my career that I be there… but I am still left feeling like I’d lost somehow. There was no escape from COVID, at least not today.

 

 

Maybe I’ll try this again in six months, or in a year when my lease is up. I’m not sure if I hate road trips or if I just had expectations that were much too high for this trip. It’s hard to say, truly. Sometimes we all fight with ourselves, our natures, our desires. Today I find myself questioning who I am without travel… why I didn’t try harder, why I didn’t even bother to call the grizzly place.

 

My lease in Denver is up in June of next year, and I think that freedom is the next milestone for change for me, the next milestone for change for Free Range Hobo. We’ll have to see what comes. I have a lot of dreams, I sure hope I actually like road trips… it’s going to be hard to drive the Pan-American Highway if I don’t.