Big Sky Blog

A roundup of some free (or inexpensive) things that you can do alone, with your kids, or with your husband/wife/boy-or-girlfriend:

- 100 Ways to Have Fun With Your Kids

- Cheap But Great Dates

- 15 Things To Do During A Money-Free Weekend

Anybody have Montana-specific suggestions for free or cheap fun things to do, places to see, and such?

Here is a repost from an entry by Randy back in 2004. What do you think of the list?

People who live in Montana are always telling everyone how lucky and blessed we are to be able to call this beautiful state our home. While it is true Montana has some of the most beautiful scenery in the world and it is not uncommon to see wildlife wandering through our backyards these do little to making Montana the incredible place to live if it weren’t for the people who have helped to make Montana what it is.

In 1999 The Missoulian published a list of the 100 most influential Montanans of the 20th Century.

It may take you a while to read the entire list but I think you’ll come away with a little better knowledge of who Montanans are and why we love this state we like to call The Last Best Place.

Received an e-mail with information about how you – yes, YOU – can help Liberty County Medical Center win a brand-new MRI machine to serve their patients! Most of you know that Chester is a small community along the Montana Hi-Line, and is more than a hundred miles away from the nearest MRI. It serves a huge geographic region, covering north-central Montana and southern Alberta. Liberty is the ONLY facility in Montana to have made it to the “final round” of voting. Right now, it is ranked #15 (out of more 100 finalists!), and has an uphill battle against other, larger facilities – but if we can get hundreds of Montanans to visit Win An MRI and cast their vote for Liberty and Chester, we just might do it! You have to watch a brief (2-min) video and then you can click the “Vote” button, and then enter a five-digit code to validate your vote. And here’s the best part: you can vote once each day until the contest closes on December 31.

So please – visit Win An MRI and cast your vote for Liberty, Chester, and Montana – do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day – and forward this to all of your Montana family and friends!

Back in 1996, the New Yorker magazine published a “map” of Montana that was based largely on stereotypes of Montanans. Remember that 1996 was the year of the Unabomber and the Freemen militia group in Jordan, and that Montana already had a reputation for attracting celebrities.

The comments on the Strange Maps website are interesting, too, with several people noting that the boundaries of the map are not quite right.

There are two scheduled public Chanukah Menorah lightings in Montana:

1. Saturday night, December 8th at 6:00 PM (Shabbat ends at 5:30 PM) in front of First Security Bank, 208 East Main Street (corner of Bozeman Avenue) in Bozeman.

2. Tuesday afternoon, December 11th at 3:00 PM at the State capitol in Helena.