Montana Vacation: Day 9 - Butte

Last night was spent at the very beautiful Lost Creek State Park just outside of Anaconda. Another very primitive camping area but very pretty - a short hike took you to a waterfall at the end of the creek which we walked to. The only huge down-side to this Park were the mosquitos.... sooooo many of them and they were everywhere! Alfredo and I got bitten all over our arms and legs - at the last count I have 23 bites on my legs alone... and they're still itching like crazy 4 days after we've returned home! The morning was spent in Butte, an architecturally very interesting city with some amazing old buildings from the 1800's but this mining town has definately seen better days and was somewhat of a ghost town in that a lot of the buildings were abandoned and the old town didn't have much in the way of shops / commerce which was kind of sad. We did however find a cute cafe to have an early lunch at and I had the Butte speciality which is a pasty - very like an English Cornish Pasty but about 5 times the size - Alfredo and I sharing it still struggled to eat it all - meat and potato crammed into a pastry shell and topped with a thick beef gravy, served with coleslaw which was a very bizarre addition but actually quite tasty. Sadly this was our last day in Montana. We had planned to slowly work our way home and stay in Idaho for a couple of days but the rain poured down again - really hard this time with the largest size hail i have ever seen. Our plan was to keep driving south (hopefully for just an hour or two) until we escaped the rain..... 13 hours later we arrived home ..... not a drive I would recommend doing with a 4 year old but he was a trooper and was excited to get back home to Buzz Lightyear and the rest of his toys!.... so a very happy vacation was had by us all and I'm already planning the next one wherever that will be.... stay tuned.....