My first order of business in Bozeman was to find a place to live, having rolled into town with a truck with my belongings from New Jersey without a place arranged in advance.  How hard can it possibly be to find an apartment in a growing place where there seems to be plenty of residential construction under way, including on apartment complexes, especially when I’m not particularly budget constrained. Well, not as easy as you might expect, I discovered.  Being a university town, most leases follow the school year and end in May after it ends or some other time during the summer before school starts up again.  But what about those new apartment complexes?  I don’t know. None that I called seemed to have immediate availability making my choices quite limited. After checking out several apartments over two days, I decided one in a four-unit building on the west side of town was just about right for me. The spacious two bedrooms is more space than I need, but if only two-bedroom units are available I can handle it.

My next order of business once I had moved my stuff in and taken the rental truck back was to find myself a gym to start getting myself back into presentable shape. A year of travel and restaurant food along with being sick of the dank cave of a gym I belonged to in New Jersey when I was back there transformed Warren into a rather chubby boy. Trimming down is actually something I don’t find hard to do when I can be completely in control of my own diet and have the time to work out for long hours. I chose Ridge Athletic Club, potentially within walking distance of my apartment (not that I’ll probably ever walk there), a large, airy, well-lit place that’s one of the nicest facilities I’ve ever gone to. My “Biggest Loser” project is advancing well with my losing about 15 pounds in the first 3 ½ weeks.

The weather my first few weeks in Bozeman was mostly on the cool side with a fair amount of snow and rain showers, so there weren’t many distractions from the gym and running various errands from doing my taxes to getting a new driver’s license and plates for my car.  In fact, it snowed lightly the day I moved in, but as March changed to April the snow on the valley floor melted. But as of late April there are rather few signs of spring beyond long daylight hours.

My first real activity in town was to attend the Montana State University Rodeo.  Yes, in these parts rodeo is an intercollegiate sport, and with MSU being the state’s top ag and engineering school the rodeo team is top ranked.  I suppose that may make up somewhat for the football team, which has had a rather dismal record the last few years.  I’ve been to quite a few rodeos at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Calgary Stampede, and Cheyenne Frontier Days among others, but I think my most recent was about 8 or 9 years ago.  So it’s been a while. Rodeo is very traditional and men and women have entirely different events.  It’s odd because there are some events like saddle bronc riding, bareback riding, and bull riding where it seems like women might not be at a disadvantage to men.  But men compete in those events as well as steer wrestling, team calf roping, and calf tie downs while women tie up goats and do barrel racing.  Like almost everyone else, one of my favorite events is bull riding, maybe because it’s the most dangerous.  But I always assumed if I were to get into rodeo my event would be steer wrestling because of my size.  It’s quite impressive to be able to get almost 5,000 people out in an indoor arena on a Saturday night for a college rodeo.  It’s clear the crowd was mostly native Montanans and country people, not Bozeman’s new urban sophisticates, hipsters, and other recent arrivals.

When a few nice sunny days did present themselves, I drove around town and the outskirts a bit, hence my pictures of snow-capped peaks of the Bridger, Gallatin, Spanish Peaks and other ranges in view from the area.  Although I live on the west side, downtown is 10 minutes away at most and Bozeman is small enough that almost anywhere in town is not much more than 10 or 15 minutes from any other place. That doesn’t prevent people here from complaining about traffic with the recent rapid growth, though. It is annoying to sometimes have to wait behind a few cars to make a left turn or when there are several cars stopped at a red light, but compared to any significant metropolitan area traffic is nothing.  And that is probably one of the biggest factors that make life in big American metropolitan areas so hellish p the sense of always being trapped in a sea of cars on the road.  On April 22^nd I needed to go downtown again to register my car at the Gallatin County Courthouse and do some banking.  I took my camera to take some pictures of the historic buildings along Main Street downtown and couldn’t help but notice how few cars there were on the city’s main drag around noon on a weekday. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why one of Montana’s nicknames is “The Last Best Place”.