I got home from Sheridan last night. It was 939 miles in one day. A time zone helped; getting locked out of my hotel room didn't. The Hampton Inn at which I stayed was full of little design flaws: casters on the laundry carts too small to roll on the carpet, for example. The flaw that did me in was that the batteries in their door entry card readers often get jarred loose, so the room becomes inaccessible. The battery compartment cover is held in place by a tamper-proof fastener, the tool for which the hotel folks lost. I tried to tamper with it with my tools, but it was sufficiently tamper-proof that I couldn't, at least not with my computer glasses, my bifocals having been locked in the room. Speaking of Starbucks, I take my own coffee for treks across the Starbuckless wilderness, and now I also take my own coffee maker, because many hotels now have coffee makers that work only with their cartridges of substandard coffee. My coffee and coffee maker were locked in the room, making my situation all the more desperate. Eventually we gained entry to the room. I made coffee, packed up and lit out.
My impression of Missoula, Montana is that people there are unfriendly. I seem always to encounter a surly person when I'm there, often when nogotiating their maze of streets looking for a decent thermosful of coffee. Lately I only stop there to gas up at Ole and Lena's, which is adjacent to the freeway. I got honked at this time by a surly person who hated the bother of slowing down to allow me to make a right turn into Ole and Lena's.
These trips get me thinking of resource allocation in the West. For example, water is scarce, but those who have it spray it around wastefully. The resource allocation musing I did on this trip was in a McDonald's in a little Eastern Montana town. I observed that I would have chosen to allocate resources that locals spend on tattoos to dentistry instead.
Back to Starbucks. The Intermountain West has more of them now. Gillette, Wyoming and Missoula, Montana have Starbucks close to the freeway (a good thing in Missoula's case). Butte has one a ways from the freeway, but the people there are nice and don't mind if you even make a left turn from the street to go there. The Starbucks in Evanston, Wyoming has been removed, which is mostly OK with me because the bastards dented my thermos and put too much salt in their scones.
Topic: Where's Howard? (Read 9334 times)
