Escaping the Everyday

Jake and I have been in Montana for about a week or so now. Montana is absolutely beautiful! If someone from the east coast were to ask me what it was like, I would describe downtown Bozeman as if Portland, ME and Lincoln, NH were to have a baby…times two! There are a lot of similar characteristics but so much better! The wilderness/nature is not even comparable, it’s such a different world compared to Maine and NH.

This past week we checked out a pizza shop and ice cream place. It’s funny because a while ago I heard a statistic that the average American consumes 12lbs of ice cream in a year which is equivalent to 23 cups of ice cream. Jake and I are probably the reason the average is so high! It’s our weakness 🙂 I’ll probably be writing about the best ice cream shops in Bozeman, MT soon enough.

We’ve had a busy week, so I thought I shared some of my favorite spots we went to.

Pizza Campania

Sweet Peaks Ice cream

Bear Trap Canyon Trail

Words can’t even describe how beautiful this hike was. Hiking is much different out here and what I find interesting is everyone hikes but it’s very different levels of hiking which is really cool. Out east, I found that if you were to talk to someone that hikes a lot, it’s most likely those going to the White Mountains.

Bear Trap Canyon trail was a hike along the river that had some dirt paths and some rock scrambles. It’s a 15 mile long trail out and back but you can really choose how much of the trail you want to hike. You have beautiful views even at the start of the hike.

College M Steep Trail

One thing that I really love about Bozeman is they have trails for all levels which means we can bring Cassie on a ton of hikes. The hikes are super close too, this one was only 25 minutes away!

We did a shorter hike called College M Steep trail and the ascent was 801ft in .50 miles which was tough! Cassie was such a natural and zoomed right up. The trail loop was 1.55 miles total, so it was a nice short hike to get in during the afternoon.

We’ve also been doing a ton of research on the wildlife out here as it’s very different from the White Mountains. I hope to write a post on that soon! It’s better to be aware and prepared then naive and get seriously hurt.

We are MOVING to Bozeman, MT

Kind of crazy where life can take you. When Jake and I met in June of 2021, I would have never guessed we’d be married and moving our little family to Montana. Living the travel life has been hard for the both of us and our animals. While they did so great on the trip here, they need stability and routine just like us.

We’ve both been struggling a little bit with the lack of routine and schedule in our lives. Jake also misses having a sober community which he built up in Portland, ME. It takes a bit to adjust to your new environment so by the time we adjust, we’d be packing up our lives and be moving to the next state. It’s caused a lot of stress because we’d be starting to look for our next place to live and it cuts out on time we could be spending on exploring MT.

So we made the decision to get an apartment in Bozeman, MT for a year! We are so excited and feel really good about this decision… mentally and financially. That way, we can really explore Bozeman and still be able to visit the other states we’ve been wanting to explore in our plan. Some states/cities are only 5 or 10 hours away so we could do a weekend getaway or a week somewhere. Having a “home base” puts our minds at ease though.

We’ve toured a couple apartment complexes, so stay tuned!

If you believe in love at first sight… I think both of us instantly fell in love with Bozeman.