Life On The Road With Augustus: Fun in Billings

Here is the theater we performed in. It was named after some dude...but I can't remember right now.

Happy Wednesday night (or is it early Thursday morning?) from Billings, Montana! Today was SHOW DAY here in the Star City of Big Sky Country...and as far as shows go, they both were fine. We had 2 really great audiences of kids who were receptive and excited probably 2 of the best audiences we've had thus far. We found out that in the 2nd show (12:30pm), some of the students who attended would end up traveling a total of 4 hours (roundtrip) just to see our show! It's times like that, when you hear things like that, in which you realize how impressive this program that the Kennedy Center runs is...and how it truly reaches out and shares the arts with kids and areas that wouldn't normally get things. And it might be a bit corny to say, but it's cool to realize that you're a part of it.
The rest of the day, everyone did their own thing. A few of us hung around downtown Billings, checking things out, doing a little shopping and having lunch at a little local soup restaurant. It was great. I think we all were hoping for a Seinfeld/Soup Nazi type set-up, but it was the furthest thing from that...and we were fine with it. And then most everyone else headed back to the hotel, but Roe and I stuck it out downtown a little bit longer to continue the exploration of downtown.

Roe enjoys her chocolate-covered strawberry from the chocolate shop.

I mean...she REALLY enjoyed it.

I think the real highlight of the day was Roe and I deciding to catch the BUS back out to our hotel. Luckily, we found out the details and learned that it went DIRECTLY in front of our hotel...so that was good fortune. PLUS we found out it was only 75 cents to ride...and we were sold. A trip on a bus in Billings is pretty much the most boring thing you can do - AND YET, we had a great time. Our bus driver was a little chatty at first, but then he focused on his route (The "South Side Loop" - pretty fly, right?) and we were good to go. UNTIL - we got to his BREAK...where he pulled over infront of a convenience store and said he'd be back in 4 minutes. But the craziest part of THAT was that we were just down the road from the hotel. But instead of getting off to walk the 3 minutes to the hotel, we waited for him to come back. Partly because we didn't want him to miss us, and partly because honestly, we had nothing else to do.