Looking West of West Yellowstone

It's neat sometimes how the clouds can make the mountains in West Yellowstone look like something totally different. From this shot it looks like there is a volcano nearby.
To be continued...

Breakfast at Nadene's and Visiting Johnny Sack Cabin

Our friend, Nadene, invited us over for breakfast near Henry's Lake. Nice view!!!

Fluffy wants to know what we are doing in her house.

Breakfast is served and it was good!!!

We walked down to the lake to look at all the wildflowers.

A view of Henry's Lake.

The trees out here almost come alive and talk to you.

Wild flowers are everywhere.

After breakfast, Nadene went to work. We and Candice headed over to the Johnny Sack cabin, since Candice has lived here four years and never been. This time the cabin was open for tours.

This cooked breakfast awhile ago.

This is the upstairs bedroom. For more history on the cabin, click here .

For more pictures, click here .

To be continued...

Movie and Searching for Northern Lights

It's hard to believe...but West Yellowstone DOES have a movie theater. We went to the Bear's Den Theatre with Candice to see Despicable Me.

Here is the inside. It's not too bad for a small town.

After the movie, we went searching for the Northern Lights. No, this is not them. It's just a car going by.

Maybe we shouldn't be looking in this area for them.

Still not them...

Is that a scene from Blair Witch Project?

Nope...just a flash photo from a moving car...also not the Northern Lights.

While we were not seeing the Northern Lights, we happened upon a moose in the road. It was a large bull with horns. Unfortunately, by the time the camera was out he was gone.

Here's a picture of where he stood.

As you can see, we did not find the Northern Lights. We may have been a little far south and it may have been a little too cloudy.

For more pictures, click here .

To be continued...

American Computer Museum, Bozeman, Montana

On our way to Bozeman today, we passed the zipline over the Madison River.

We visited old downtown Bozeman which has an eclectic selection of shops, if shopping is your thing.

We then visited the American Computer Museum, which is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary with free admission for everyone.

One of the first modern-day adding and accounting machines was the comptrometer pictured in the middle of the top shelf. Variations of this machine were used from about the 1920's to the 1960's. Accounting would be simplified with the evolution of the computer.

This is a Block I Apollo Guidance Computer on loan from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Computers of this type were used in the Apollo I and the Apollo 4 & 6 unmanned missions. They had a whopping 1,024 bytes of RAM and 4,576 bytes of ROM!

This hard disk drive was built in 1975 with 10 megabytes of storage and a weight of 75 pounds!

Have you ever wondered what the inside of your laptop looked like? Pretty simple stuff.

An actual cross-section of a human brain was used to demonstrate that, while there are similarities, a human brain and a computer are vastly different.

This poster describes the functions of all the various parts of the brain.

The first commercial "video arcade game" is not a familiar-looking one to us.

The first home video games are another story. Most of us over 40 years old remember playing our first game of Pong or Simon.

These machines are familiar to all of us who attended high school or college in the 70's and 80's.
The PDP-8, introduced in 1965, was the first commercially successful desktop computer. For $18,000, you could have one of the 1,450 made and 4 kilobytes of memory. Oh...this one was big too...at 250 pounds.

The first computers filled a room and had less memory than your current cell phone.

Instead of using chips, they used vacuum tubes.

This IBM 1620 Computer is an artifact from Montana State University used from 1964-1968.

For more information on the American Computer Museum, visit their website here .

Like we have mentioned previously, there are signs warning of the dangers of meth in Idaho. Here was one warning of meth in Montana.

Here's a sign that a recent hail storm caused a bit of damage.

There were similar signs of the hail storm all up and down the major streets of Bozeman.

We even had hail, without the damage, when we arrived home after our trip to Bozeman.

For more pictures, click here .

To be continued...

Evening In West Yellowstone

As evening sets over West Yellowstone, Marlon took this picture out of the IMAX window.

To be continued...