"Ticket to the West" : A life in Montana - TicketPrinting.com
| August 14, 2008 |  View for printing |
Mike Yinger used to be a defense and aerospace industry consultant in Los Angeles. But in LA, traffic jams can change lives.
It was 1987 and he was creeping along the 405, trying to get to a client meeting in El Segundo. The cars were stacked against one another, in their usual bumper to bumper. He looked over and saw a man in a big black BMW talking on a car phone—a rare luxury in those days. Yinger was in an ‘84 Camry.
“And I was thinking, you know, the most I can expect to do, if I continue to live here, is just to be in a nicer car,” Yinger told me when I visited him in Bozeman, where he now has an online business called TicketPrinting.com http://www.ticketprinting.com .
Twenty minutes after seeing the man in the Beamer, Yinger’s transmission blew.
A week later at the garage, Yinger was in the waiting room and began flipping through a copy of Field & Stream. The issue had, as he put it, “a beautiful spread on Montana.” He zipped up there with his then-wife—basically to see if the pictures were real—and a month later, they were residents.
Yinger, 57, is part of a growing number of urban refugees who are setting up shop in the Northern Rockies. Many, as Yinger did at first, travel during the week on consulting trips; they simply spend their weekends in a nicer place than they used to. Others move in and bring their businesses with them. Thanks to the Internet, they can.
Yinger started TicketPrinting.com http://www.ticketprinting.com in 1997 so that he could live and work in Montana. The business boasts many things that are typical of start-ups—an ugly building on the outskirts of town and an office foosball table. But it also has easy access to world-class fly fishing.
By Zachary Stauffer
Full Story and Video: http://www.news21project.org/project/american_dream
No reader comments so far. Be the first to comment by clicking the button below.
Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law. Full copyright retained by the original publication. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
