Adventures with Matthew

Matthew McInnes and his grandparents of the Mueller persuasion shared a couple of weeks together in mid-August 2006 in Billings MT. This was after our trip to Ashland OR, when we swung down to Marin County CA to say hello to the McInnes' and to pick up Matt for a 3 day odyssey through the Nevada desert, the righteous religious of downtown Salt Lake City, and the mountains of eastern Idaho and western Montana.

Here we are at the Fair (upper left), getting ready to hurl our stomach contents on unlucky friends and relatives. Matt is looking for victims in a bumper car (right).

I was grateful that Matt rode most of the rest of the rides by himself. The Fair is a fascinating place as we discovered by just walking around.













We learned something about the joys of canning, the ?thrill of hanging upside down, and how much fun it is to just walk around and look at people and things. This latter is a well-recognized management technique too.

Probably the most unexpected fun we had was when Carol heard a strange noise in the middle of the night and naturally woke me up to investigate this noise: I heard some water running but couldn't see anything out the window so I carefully went outside with large flashlight at the ready: I found a fountain of water, which looked like a geyser in Yellowstone Park, in the middle of Ramada Drive. See below.

I called the water people, and had a little trouble convincing the night guy that we really had a leak, and then they eventually figured out where to turn the water off, put some warning lights up and waited for daybreak.

Lots of really nice and noisy equipment arrived early the next morning. Hard hats and standing around watching machines do the work were the order of the day.



Of course, Matt watched carefully all the activity all day long.
The high point was being invited into the cab of the Deere backhoe.


We visited ZooMontana and we also checked out the dinosaur exhibit at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.