Our Journey to Montana- Part 1

About four years ago, a girlfriend of mine told me about a fun website where you could fill out a questionnaire and it would suggest places where you might enjoy living. I think it was called findyourspot.com. At that point, we had three children under the age of 6 and so one evening, for kicks, we went online and filled out the form.

The town that came back as one of our best matches was Whitefish, Montana. Now, we never would have thought another thing about it, except after that, this town we had never heard of before, was now everywhere! Kind of like when you get a new car and then all of a sudden, everyone is driving that car.

A few days after we took the survey, Hottie Husband and I were at a home one of his customer's was buying. HH is a contractor and the customer wanted me to help pick out some paint colors for their new home. As I was walking through the home, I opened a door to see what was inside and there was a woman standing there folding laundry. I apologized profusely and soon learned that this woman was the current owner of the home. I asked her where they were moving. And she replied, "Whitefish, Montana." I told her how that was so funny because we had just taken this survey and yada, yada, yada. Anyway, I ran off and told HH about it. We both thought it was interesting and a little funny.

This little town we had never heard of before came up so much over the next few months that we decided a visit to this town might be a good idea. However, we were now in Spring and in the middle of baseball season with HH coaching. Also, the cost of flights up there was about $400.00 a person and we had five persons who needed seats plus the cost of a hotel. We could not afford it. No time, not enough money.

Then one night HH said, "Spring Break- we have no baseball- just check it one more time for these five days." I did and a package came up for hotel for four nights plus 5 round trip tickets for $1500.00. We booked it.

At this time the boys were ages 6, 4 and 1 year. Unknowingly, we arrived the day that the ski resort closed, and it was officially mud season. I did not know what that meant until we were there. It is a season somewhere between Winter and Spring, where the snow is melting and everything is muddy and the golf courses aren't even open yet.

We drove around and we hated it. It didn't look like the pictures. We drove around trying to figure out what was so beautiful and great about this town. Everything looked ugly to us and we were daunted by the fact that we now had four more days in this place with nothing to do. What were we going to do with our time? We drove around so much that we made Toots puke in car and that was lots of fun to clean up.

I finally put a stop to the driving and said we had to do something fun with the kids. So we bought some fishing poles for them and found this not so great fishing spot, where they caught nothing. I walked and I prayed, "Lord, if there is something here we are supposed to see, please take these blinders off and let us see it."

We went to a restaurant in town and it was awful. It was dark, the people had no personalities and everyone was quiet. With three little boys, I felt like our table was in stereo with every clank of a fork being heard across the room. It was weird.

We went back to the hotel and I took the older boys to the indoor pool to swim. HH took Toots in the jogger stroller and went for a run.

And as he listened to Third Day and ran without a set course, something happened.

to be continued....