Roadtrip to Dillon and the Andrus Hotel

"Pack your bags," I snarled at my children through gritted teeth. "We need a trip to Dillon."

To my significant other, I framed it differently.

"Honey, let's go to the Andrus Hotel in Dillon. I think we deserve a little getaway, don't you think?"

You see, the kids had been bouncing off the walls and shouting nonsense for weeks. They are the best kids in the world, absolutely adorable. But after so many weeks of summer vacation, they were nearly feral. Their requests for popsicles and Lego sets were hastening troublingly. Incipient madness was beginning to creep in, evident in the wild look in their eye. Time to go before this turned into a "Lord of the Flies" situation.

Suddenly, it seemed exigent that we should get out of the house, right now, immediately.

So I herded the kids into the car along with their sainted mother, sped the car down the drive, and tore hell for leather onto the freeway.

Why Dillon? Well, I'd never been there except in passing, and I had always meant to check it out. My only hope was that it would be a kid-friendly town because my kids were coming with a vengeance.

I was worried, for one, that the Andrus Hotel, Dillon's swankiest hotel for over 100 years and a finalist for Best Luxury Hotel, Best Historic Hotel, and Best Rural Hotel in this year's Best of Montana competition, would be too classy for my little heathens. We arrived and found a handsomely elegant lobby, complete with a selection of snacks, beer and wine, and other accouterments. This is exactly the kind of place, I thought, that my kids could absolutely wreck. My suspicion was almost confirmed when, within three minutes of entering the lobby, my 6-year-old son managed to get one of those executive desk toys that goes "click click click" on a table in the lobby hopelessly tangled.

But then Ari, the extremely gracious evening clerk, welcomed us, checked us in, gave us the tour, and, later, I assume, carefully unsnared the wires and balls of the desk toy. All through our stay, Ari was kind and patient with our little monsters.

Our room was the Carnegie Suite, which, in addition to a handsome kitchen, living room, and two full bathrooms (one featuring a luxurious walk-in shower), also featured two bedrooms, each with its own television. That night, we watched Shark Tank in the suite's master bedroom while the kids watched Shark Week in their bedroom. We heard only occasional hooting, and due to the Andrus's sturdy construction, just barely.

While we celebrated that the Andrus had mostly pacified and defanged our children, I opened a couple of books that I had brought along. Being sort of a pasty indoor guy I find that the best thing to do when I am interested in a place is read about it, and it just so happens that Thomas Savage, one of Montana's most lauded 20th-century novelists (and author of the novel Power of the Dog, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning film of the same name) wrote quite a bit about the Andrus. Savage's novels, like Power of the Dog and Midnight Line, frequently employ the Andrus Hotel in their narratives, sometimes calling it the Andrews Hotel, or the Herndon House, but always clearly referencing the iconic Dillon landmark.

Savage's biographer Alan Weltzien notes how, in the author's semi-fictional world, the Andrus emerged as an important, even emblematic location, which "symbolizes a whole category of hotels in many Northern Rockies or Great Plains towns wherein civic pride manifested itself in one respectable, even fancy, hotel that served as a community center and place to dress up."

Indeed, the Andrus represented opulent comfort not previously seen in Montana's cattle frontier. A piece in the Dillon Examiner took obvious relish in describing the newly opened hotel: "On the first floor is the spacious lobby, 50 x 100 feet, a well lighted spacious room with tile floor and elegantly furnished with comfortable upholstered chairs, davenports, and writing tables." There was also a bar, restaurant, cigar counter, and a marble stair leading to the second and third floors comprising "sleeping rooms, fifteen bath rooms, four shower baths," special rooms for salesmen to sample their wares, and living rooms for socializing. That dining room, incidentally, was "beautifully furnished and elaborately decorated. The furnishings are of circassion walnut and white marble and were installed at great expense. The walls are tinted in light brown blending with the furniture and the electric light features are of white and gold."

While some of those design elements have been replaced, the Andrus Hotel today retains all the dignity and refinement of its early days and adds a big dollop of comfort.

Might I add that the mattress in the master bedroom was probably the best one I've slept on this decade? That I awoke, miraculously, without any aches and pains in my back? That I floated around the town all day like a helium balloon?

The Dillon Tribune-Examiner would sum up The Andrus Hotel as "arguably the single most ambitious, grandest, classiest building project in the 125-year history of the town."

We, our kids, and especially my back, all agree with that assessment.

Setting out from the Andrus, we found many interesting, fun, and family-friendly things to do within walking distance. We bought Monopoly at The Tabletop Vault, a game store in downtown Dillon, and talked with Asa, the owner, who was able to recommend some other new games for our kids. We ate at Papa T's, a great old-fashioned bar and burger joint with a bank of arcade machines for the kids and an ice-cold beer for the grown-ups. We checked out the impressive Beaverhead County Museum. We tried on hats and boots at Atomic 79, which has an amazing neon sign that is almost worth the trip to Dillon right there. 

We also found Asian Mix just around the block from the Andrus. Asian Mix is so delicious, warm, and friendly that we ate there two nights in a row. The owner, Mi Keh, talked to our children for ten minutes. A mother of five herself, she assured my hungry six-year-old that his boba tea was coming and winked at him when we chided him for his impatience. She gave us a handful of extra fortune cookies, which we opened and ate that night back at the hotel, and she even took a picture of us for her wall of customers.

We would have found this charming enough, but then she served us some of the best curry, General Tso's chicken, and coconut chicken noodle soup we'd ever had. The mango sticky rice? Don't even get me started. The Myanmar Red Curry Beef? Incomparable. Dillon is a very lucky town.

Then, to deliver the coup de grace, we took the kids to the local splash pad. There, adults and children alike were doused by mounted water cannons, fountains, and an ingenious contraption that fills buckets with water and then dumps them unpredictably on whoever is standing underneath. This author, by the way, watched the bucket contraption for longer than he'd care to admit, mouth open.

But maybe the best part of our trip was playing board games together on the rooftop garden of the Andrus Hotel. From there we could see the whole town framed in lovely sunset reds. We had a glass of wine. The kids, their eyes growing heavy, sipped on their sodas. The mounted flag flapped triumphantly over it all.

Dillon had turned out to be a town so unpretentious and kid-friendly that it entertained even my whirling dervishes - yet sophisticated, beautiful, and interesting enough to captivate us, too.

In short, now my family and I can't wait until the next time we need a trip to Dillon.