Photo(s) of the Week {2}

Lake McDonald, Glacier National Park.  A gray, foggy day in January…

Glacier National Park

This gallery contains 17 photos.

We spent a day in Glacier last weekend, just going for a drive with the dog and the camera.  This national park is beautiful, and pretty much in our backyard so we go hiking and camping every summer in different … Continue reading →

Will Goes Flying

Last weekend Will got invited to go flying with a friend, who’s a pilot and has a little two person “pacer” plane.  They just took a couple hours of early morning to fly over the valley, circle over our house, and saw four brown bear from the bird’s eye view.  So here’s just a few pictures he took from his handy iphone…

View of the beautiful Flathead Valley and Flathead Lake

Jewel Basin- mountains that we hike in the summer

Still a ton of snow!

Looks like a lot of fun, and a beautiful day for flying around!

A Taste of Italy in the Montana Winter

Last weekend hubby and I made a trip down to Bozeman, MT to spend time with family, go shopping, out to eat downtown, and have some quality time with my grandma.  I love going there, Bozeman is beautiful with lots to do, lots of good food to find, and full of young life and fun happenings as it is a college town.  I spent one semester there before I ended up settling in to the U of M, there are beautiful mountains and a lot of rivers.  Not many lakes, we have all the lake fun up here in NW MT.  Bozeman is kind of like a second hometown to me, it feels very homey, as I lived there for a little while on a few different occasions, and it’s where my mom is from so all of her family is there.  My grandma lives in her house still (on her own, at 88!) on a road out in the country that my grandpa had put in when they had their house built.  Soon after that my three sets of aunts and uncles followed suit and moved out there, so they live right by her, kind of in a triangle 🙂  Actually, all four of them built their home out there, pretty cool.

My Aunt Connie and cousin Nichole own an Italian specialty food store, All Things Italian, which now has my pantry accustomed to quite a few must-haves and cooking staples.  If you love to cook and love Italian foods, you’d love it there.  I love browsing through all the shelves of goodies and seeing what’s new.  …After enjoying a very satisfying Italian sandwich and a latte 🙂

It doesn’t take long to fill up the basket.  We grabbed the usual pasta and jars of soup, olives, and some awesome chocolate, and this time we picked out some beautiful seeds to start planting.  I really can’t wait to start growing these vegetables!

Lots of fun cooking ingredients

Shelves of eye candy

All kinds of Italian pastas

Delicious olives and capers

Specialty cheeses

Italian meats

My favorite- quality chocolate

Wines from Italy

Our chocolate indulgence

Doesn’t take long to fill up the basket!

Our beautiful Italian seeds to sow

Uncle Chris’s green thumbs at work, winter-time tomatoes

Aunt Connie

Plants getting ready for the greenhouse

Cute baby chicks getting ready for the coup

Lawrence’s boat

Soon to set sail

Pretty nice craftsmanship

Out for dinner

At Blackbird

Wood fired pizza

Nichole and Jared

We shopped, went to dinner downtown, and also had dinner at Connie and Chris’s and saw the cute baby chicks and all the plants Chris has getting ready for the greenhouse.  Also visited with my Uncle Lawrence who just finished building a boat for the first time!  It’s very cool, and they’ll soon make the sail to go on it.  And most importantly, enjoyed some quality time with my Grandma Anne…

Family, food, and shopping… it was a great weekend. 🙂

If you ever in Bozeman, MT stop in to ATI and say hi to Connie and Nichole!