Billings, Montana, Baby!

So, maybe a year ago I had my fed court debut (wahoo!). Then, I switched to a City firm (sweet!). Now, I'm going out of town on business (fancy!). Yes, the trip is for cool lawyer shit (a week full of depositions), but - more importantly - at age 30, my client is paying for me to do work on a plane, in a hotel, and at a federal building in MT (me?).

Deps get mixed reviews from people I have surveyed: either completely worthless all of the time, or great for "learning" the case and the witnesses. Either way, since I'm so new at this all, I'm basically treating every dep like a trial. F'ing nerve-wracking, right? So let's talk about beer instead!

I believe MT has the 5th lowest population in the country and the 3rd largest area. So, lots of state, not a lot of people. The people who were here, though, were happy.

Our flight was at 7:45AM and we had a connection in Minneapolis. We worked the entire first leg, which wasn't that bad, actually. When we hit Minneapolis, the time difference was really noticeable (i.e., it was lunch time at home and only 10AM in MN). We had lunch at the airport, did some work during the layover and basically vegged out on the second leg. It's 8:30PM here and I'm sooooo ready for bed.

I admit that I had some kind of weird teen angst about accidentally working out in the hotel gym at the same time as The partner :) (potentially awkward). But we did both end up in the gym at the same time, basically as soon as we got settled into the hotel, and it was totally normal and fine (headphones really help, I guess).

Billings is really cool. It is only 7 miles wide and in a valley. High elevations, mountains all around us.  A handful of Indian reservations in Montana, and relatively nearby. Lots of Indian souvenirs (kitschy and legit).  

The thing to do in Billings appears to be drink beer out of microbrewery. Although we had to work long days that for me started at 4:30 AM, we had some time each evening to enjoy dinner and beers from at least two different breweries each night. We always sat at the bar wherever we went, and that gave us a great opportunity to meet the local people. Ironically, one of the owners of the brewpubs, Uber brewery, was from Philadelphia. 

After the last day of depositions, we will have some time and went for a walk to the farthest brewery, Angry Hanks, which was still probably less than a quarter-mile from the hotel. It was not warm but it was sunny, and I think we were both very relieved to be finished with our work for the week, and heading home for the weekend. The partner and I toasted to the end of the week. We laughed as we both acknowledge that it was a very "normal "week, considering we had to spend the entire week with a coworker.

The next morning I woke up at 4 AM and headed to the Billings airport. While the partner would be heading back to Philadelphia, I was making my way to Seattle. It was only a short two hour flight, and I met some cool people while waiting for the flight and on the flight.

 When we finally stop chatting about 40 minutes into the flight, I put on a movie I had downloaded. The movie was called Nebraska.  the opening scene was a man walking down the highway in, wouldn't you know it, Billings, Montana...