I had always thought the center of the nation was was Kansas. Yet, there is a contender for the title. In driving through Belle Fourche, South Dakota, we encountered a large sign announcing a monument for the geographic center of the nation. We had to stop.
We really aren't into visiting battlefields. Generally, they are macabre, empty fields with little to look at and much to get depressed about. But Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument has some striking points of interest and, frankly, we were driving right by.
The Montana State Bozeman community has lucked out with the Bridger Brewing Company right across from campus. We were lucky having it right next to a Verizon retailer when mechanical crisis lead us to get a new phone.
Along with the Museum of the Rockies 300,000 objects spanning 500,000,000 years of history are examples of earlier nomadic equipment that is not that unlike today's features.
Bozeman, Montana has dinosaurs. The museum of the Rockies is where you find them. Compare T. rex skulls and the transition between an adolescent Triceratops to an adult. See paleontology in action at the show lab where paleontologists are absorbed in cleaning, preparing, and analyzing new fossil discoveries. My favorite curatorial flourish is the partial sculptures where half is a fully fleshed dinosaur with the other side being the bones in situ.
Not to be outdone by its neighbor, Virginia City, Nevada City has its own oddity: a collection of music machines. Player pianos to full blown orchestras are on display and some remain accessible to any loose change that you may wish to pop into their mechanized bellies.
Experience a piece of Montana's gold rush history and the oddities that come with it at Virginia City Historical Museum in Virginia City, Montana.
Most people have a pretty sterile vision of museums. They have institutional white walls and satin ropes. There may be a security guard perched by the entry way to the gallery. The J.Spencer Watkins Memorial Museum is not that museum.
So many oddities come hand-in-hand with a ghost town. They are sieve for oddity: anything normal comes and goes but the strange curiosities lodge in the town to stay. In the case of Virginia City, that means a Nickelodeon that still charges a nickel to watch Bawdy films of scandalous women show their ankles and get your fortune told.
Montana has had its share of gold rushes. When gold was discovered in Alder Canyon in the 1860s, it was yet another in a string of strikes.