"Ticket to the West" : A life in Montana – TicketPrinting.com

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