We're in Buffalo Bill Land - Cody, Wyoming

And we didn't even intend to be here this trip!

We finally got out of Dodge (home) on Friday in the early afternoon with no more delays or misadventures and headed west. We made it as far as Medora and the Badlands and Teddy Roosevelt National Park. This is a rather unique place as you can see from the picture below.




The little town of Medora sits just to the south of the park. The Marquis De Mores (from France) brought his wife and children here back in the late 1800s and built a packing plant. He came up with the idea of refrigerated railroad cars to ship beef instead of shipping the cattle live because they would lose too much weight in the shipping process. It's a long story, but quite an interesting one if you care to look it up on the internet.

Below is a picture of the house that he lived in. He called it the Chateau De Mores. The town of Medora is named after his wife. Ole and I have been through it numerous times, so we didn't go this time.





It was over 100 degrees when we pulled into the campground and got set up. We decided to take a little bike trip through town, and of course, having been there so many times before there wasn't much for us to see. So we detoured to the Iron Horse Saloon, a place where all the locals hang out. Tourists don't usually go there - they hang in the more tourist oriented places where their kids can have fun. Below is a picture of the Iron Horse Saloon.

Lots of interesting people watching and visiting in this place. That's the kind of place that Ole and I like to patronize when we travel - where the local people go. We don't tend to go to the Big Name Franchise places. So this one was full of cowboys who had been hitting the trail hard all day, along with their wives/girlfriends. They had a live four-piece band last night called Thunder Rolls. They played lots of the old, old country western stuff - you know - Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Sr., etc. Good stuff, of course that's the stuff I cut my teeth on so it's got to be good. One of the band members drove up in his SUV, his best buddy, a cattle dog in the front seat who sat patiently waiting for him all evening. He was wearing dusty cowboy boots, a t-shirt with a pocket that held the out line of a Copenhagen box and a pretty crusty cowboy hat. Man, could he sing and play the guitar. The others were dressed quite similarly. True cowboys, people, true cowboys. They were even a bit on the bowlegged side from sitting a-horse too much.

When we woke up this morning and looked out the front window of the RV this is what we saw.

Elk feeding on the butte. Sorry this isn't a clearer shot, but I had to use a long lens for this.

So we headed west again with the intention of ending the day in Red Lodge, Montana. When I called for reservations at every campground I could find on the Internet or our Big Campground Book, they all laughed at me. Apparently the town has been booked for months because this is the weekend of the Iron Horse Rally - in other words a bunch of bikers have taken over the town as their headquarters in order to ride over the Bear Tooth Pass and back again. Darn bikers - monopolizing everything like that.

So our next option was to headquarter out of Cody and ride over Bear Tooth from the south. The Iron Horse Rally has apparently spilled over to Cody also, as we managed to get the last camp site in town that would accommodate our 40' motor home. I LOVE traveling in this big rig, but it does on occasion present some problems - like not being able to get a campsite big enough.

Senior Citizen Simon is on his first adventure in the rig. The first sixty miles were a bit on the nerve racking side as he cried and howled and insisted on sitting on the bottom step where there's a little window for him to watch the world go by. Then he finally settled down under the kitchen table and fell asleep. When we finally stopped he was out socializing with us, and then after we went to bed he was all worked up - time to play, etc., and spent the rest of the night marching across both Ole and I. Round and Round we go, where he stops, nobody knows. And he didn't stop until the sun came up. Then what did he do? Went to sleep of course. Hopefully things will be better tonight. Petunia used to love to sit on the dash and watch the world go by but Simon doesn't appear to be interested at all. Maybe that will change. And to begin with every time the door would open he'd make a dash for it, but that seems to have changed now. Hopefully, he won't change his mind.

Well, I must hit the shower and on to bed. After being hot and sweaty all day it's going to feel good. The temperatures have been horribly hot. When we arrived in Cody this afternoon at 5 o'clock it was 105. More coming tomorrow - no relief they tell us.

So - adios for now - more tomorrow I hope.