Wild wild west

We started the day at the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center of Great Falls, MT, an impressive museum overlooking the Missouri River.  The kids earned their junior ranger patches by actually learning stuff as they moved through the exhibits.  Unlike the End of the Oregon Trail Lewis & Clark museum that we had visited near Portland, this one was actually about Lewis & Clark's expedition. Dane & Drake were the resident Indian experts having been studying both the Northwest and Sioux tribes this month.  They emphatically disagreed with the museum's "authentic" pronunciation of Sacagawea (using a hard "g" sound instead).  They had a tipi exhibit that was cool - the kids are realizing that tipis are more than just an Indian novelty item, since half the houses that we have passed in these small Montana towns (near the reservations) have tipis in their yards.  After a brief stop at yet another skate park (we always seem to pass right by them and I am always hoping that no one notices - sigh... we are on a time table here!), we made it to Virginia City and Nevada City, two impressively restored ghost towns.  Although the main tourist season has wound down, the buildings are just there available for self-tour.  They all have window displays so you can look inside the mercantile, the telegraph office, the blacksmith shop etc..  Once I dragged the boys away from the old fashioned out house ("Dad used it first!!"), they followed Greg to the old broken down railcars at the train depot, totally ignoring the closed for the season signs.  The fact that it was off-season worked to their advantage enabling them to actually break into a few dilapidated rail cars by climbing through a broken window.  I could see that Virginia city might get a little touristy in the summer, but at 6PM on a weekday in September, just as a summer storm was brewing, blowing dust and a few drops of rain on the all but deserted streets, it was not too hard to imagine what life might have really been like in a gold rush town 150 years ago.