First, we visited Western Marketing in Billings, the biggest food broker in the state. Today was the annual cutting of new products that may have a place at MSU. We sampled products that no one else in the state of Montana had even seen yet. Overall, we tasted 25 new products!!! As Paul said, "This is tasting, not eating." It was hard to only take one bite and then through the rest away. Ronda had a packet of POS (point of sales) information for us and we followed along as we sampled things like oven roasted turkey breast, trans fat-free french fries and pinwheel wedges, pasta salad, cheese sticks, egg rolls, wontons, salmon filets, 9 new Tyson products, and bacon. The owner of the company came down to meet & greet us. His name is Leon and he was very personable. We had a long discussion about the new trans fat-free trend and how it is affecting the market. They are currently selling many items (even margarine) that are trans fat-free but he believes that it will not become popular unless Montana moves to trans fat-free legislation. There is not much of a demand otherwise. It was really empowering to feel comfortable giving nutritional information to someone so high up in the "food chain". Western Marketing was truly hospitable and my experience was wonderful! I love food! Afterwards, April took us & Ronda out to lunch in downtown Billings at Sweet Ginger. It was a cute Asian restaurant... I was already so full though!
From Billings, we made our way to Red Lodge. Red Lodge is a small community with lots of little shops, bakeries, etc. I stopped and had a chocolate chip cookie. We wandered around and then went to P
aul's condo. He has remodeled the entire condo and did all of the impressive woodworking himself. Outside, there were piles of what appeared to be snow. In reality, it was piles of cottonwood fluff that had fallen off the trees. 
Then, we headed towards the Beartooth Pass. This mountain pass reaches almost 11,000 ft! It closes during the winter due to large volumes of snow. It was a series of switchbacks that led us up out of the valley and into the snow.
From the Beartooth Pass, we passed through Top of the World, Wyoming, Cook City, and other small towns leading to Yellowstone. As if our day wasn't amazing enough already, we saw 5 bears in Yellowstone!!! There is kind of an ongoing joke about how I saw 5 bears there when I went in May (1 grizz w/n the first 5 minutes and the other w/n the first hour) and Paul didn't see his first bear until working there for 4 summers! Sure enough, we're driving along and there are some cars stopped in the middle of the road (not highly uncommon in Yellowstone) and there is a bear about 30 ft from our car, walking our way! He continued walking parallel to our car and came within about 15 ft from the car. After that we were really pumped about seeing him and we didn't think that things could get any better. We drove about 20 minutes down the road and there's another black bear! We got out of the car and watched him with binoculars and took more pictures. This one was a little further away, luckily. At this point we were on Cloud 9. Things definately couldn't get better than this... until we saw a grizzly and her two cubs playing in a meadow!!! I have never seen anything so cute in my whole life! The cubs were wrestling and rolling around and the mom was eating and scratching in the dirt a little. The binoculars made it easy to see their expressions and to watch them "up close". It was absolutely amazing! We watched them for about 20 minutes or so until they started to retreat. Yellowstone is just a stunning place. We went to the Grand View of the Lower Falls which was a viewpoint that I didn't visit when I was there in May. Paul also took us around Canyon Village which is where he worked for several summers. He managed the food service operation. It was neat to hear his stories and to take a tour from someone who really knows the place.
We headed home right around dark, which is a little after 10 pm around here. I slept the whole way back to Bozeman!
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