MontanaWithKids.com

I’ve heard bad things about summer brother birthdays, and I believe all these no-guests–showing-up rumors because I have exactly such a brother in my own family. A couple years ago our parents sent out more than 2-dozen handwritten invitations before school let out asking parents to bring their youngster friends, and not one of them even had the decency to RSVP saying they weren’t going to come.* That’s probably why my parents take his summer birthday so seriously, and this was another really great gem for him.
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One of the must-see attractions in Montana is the Spokane Bar Sapphire Mine. Don’t take my word for it, they’ve been featured everywhere from National Geographic to the Discovery Channel, and those are tough customers to please. It’s a short drive from Helena, and worth your visit, even if you aren’t an aspiring prospector.
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There was an episode of South Park making fun of guys like this, the steadfast historical re-enactors that refuse to break character, but if you’ve never met with their kind, they really are every bit as annoying as that clever bit of off-color satire I’ve suggested. They really can’t take a joke.
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If you find yourself short on gas or long on appetite and don’t know which town you’re about to pull in to, you just might be heading into Three Forks, Montana. That’s especially true if you’re just west of Bozeman, but it’s almost equally likely that you have no idea where you are. Three Forks has got food, gas and lodging sure, but they’ve also got the Headwaters Museum, which is, you know, pretty good.
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If you’re driving through Montana and you want to see something interesting, the first thing you have to do is pull off the highway. If that doesn’t satiate your appetite, you may need to stay off the highway and start cutting around the state, as we did. That isn’t exactly how we found the historic city of Seeley Lake, but it was a fair enough excuse to be so far off the beaten path that we ourselves needed to beat.
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For those of you late to our Perplexing games, let me take you back some years and tell you that, until just last year, we were a family of journalists entrusted with the noble duty of testing out cars for the media. It wasn’t an easy job, but the benefits were amazing. So I think I speak with the bare minimum authority when it comes to cool cars, and this place had them all over.
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