We got straight to business: ice cream, champagne, sea salt encrusted dark chocolate caramels, tea at sunset on the porch of our hotel, and a late — really late for us — dinner. Two hours of dinner no less, with endless courses, and yummy wine, and a highly-concerned about my gluten-free needs waitress, and flour-less chocolate cake.
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| The Sacajawea Hotel in Three Forks |
Our decadent fest was interrupted only once, and it was by a long, long walk, which doesn't really count as an interruption, except that we weren't ingesting anything delicious, save the distant, majestic bluffs and the Madison river.
Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, we turned over most every rock of the significant experiences that we've each encountered these past few years, checking out the moss, and the critters, and the streams we're swimming in.
Like ten times, I thought I was revealing new things that I'd only just discovered about myself, only to have Audi say, "yeah, you've always been like that."
Stuffed to the gills, we collapsed into bed, awaking this morning to a full day of a different sort of indulgence: the embracing of our soulsister nature and history geek curiosity.
We began with a private tour of the most unusual greenhouse I've ever encountered, which was firmly attached to a trailer in Three Forks, Montana, and built on a floor that was dug, by hand, five feet underground. Inside this strange structure the humidity stuck to our skin, the intoxicating lemon-sweet smell of a daphne tree clung to my insides, and the sounds of tree frogs and bees broke the cold, wet blanket of silence shrouding the world outside.
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| A daphne cutting |
I learned about the greenhouse and it's creator, John, who started it 30 years ago, at the permaculture class that Stella and I took last week.
Along with being the Willy Wonka of the plant world, John also has a full rock museum in his garage, (dreamy for Audi,) as well as a display of photographs of tree bark that he's been snapping for 20 years. I could barely contain my bark-sniffing self.
When we made it out of the magic garden and rock land, we headed off to Missouri headwaters state park, where the Missouri river is born from the Gallatin and Madison rivers. This is the land of Sacajawea, quite close to where she was captured, (kidnapped really,) and later, where she met Lewis and Clark, and saved their butts. A lost sister who transformed this country, her fate was left unrecorded, unknown to this day.
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Not drizzle, nor cold, nor an empty gas tank could dissuade us from our final destination: Buffalo Jump state park.
"Two state parks in one day!" declared Audi.
My kind of girl.
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