The Green Light-Missoula, MT

Back in the woods again and a brief encounter with a moose, we took a couple of days camping to get to Missoula, Montana. For those of you who have never been there, this is a great little college town with more bars per capita in the downtown area than Seattle has Starbucks. The “Drunken People Crossing” sign in the Downtown also showed they had a sense of humor.

Struggling again with a place to stay that was close to the place we would be doing a show early the next day, we again decided to stay in the city. Finding a little backwater street behind the old train station that was now a swanky office building, we set up camp. Like most of Montana, people really don’t give a damn what you do as long as you don’t bother anybody else. It is a good policy, and it has served them well.

What we didn’t realize however until a little later in the evening, is that this parking area also served quite a few bars at night. In retrospect, I think most of the parking lots in Missoula serve bars at night, but we didn’t know that yet. Sometime around 3am, the patrons begin to file out and we were once again treated to an exuberant cacophony of noise and some nice comments on the Airstream. It was good to be back home!

The next day was Farmers Market in Missoula and we had arranged to do a show in front of a local green retailer (The Green Light) just down the street from the market. The show was a resounding success, and it was refreshing to show some of the good old boy ranchers and farmers about solar power and composting toilets. The most rewarding thing was that they were truly interested, and could actually see how those things could fit into their lives.