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.

Miscellaneous Items and What Not

You guys are just the best, you know that? Your comments on yesterday's entry left me with a lot of chuckles. Art thinks Jane needs to go play on the interstate highway near a truck stop. Poolie and Shear agree and Carolyn thinks we need to take Jane out into the forest and tie her to a tree - DEEP into the forest. When we return from our trip and Jane starts lipping off again I'll certainly consider those. Dick and Jane left on a bike trip about a week ago going up the north shore of Lake Superior. Jane wasn't exactly speaking to me at the time they left, so who knows what the situation will be by the time we return.

We met the remainder of The Circle for supper last night at the Watering Hole. General consensus was that Jane needs to come back from this trip with a very definite attitude change - for the positive - but I don't know that Jane's capable of that.

And to respond to Art's suggestion to use the satellite dish for internet service while we're on the road: I used to have internet satellite service at our house a number of years ago. It was extremely spendy like $70 a month on top of our satellite TV service. But at that time that's all that was available to us as we were too far out of town for cable. Now I have a wireless service that's broadcast from a tall building about 15 miles away and it's much cheaper and faster. Yes, internet satellite/tv service is available for motorhomes, but to install the gear that's needed for it runs in the several thousand dollar range. And that's just for the equipment. The monthly fees range in the hundred dollar neighborhood, depending on what TV package you subscribe to. When we've traveled to Quartzite, AZ in the winters we've checked these systems out, and have put it on our "someday" list.

For those of you who don't know what/where Quartzite, AZ is: it's known as the Snowbird's Paradise. It's located on the border of Arizona and California, about halfway between the Nevada and Mexico border. It's got a stable population of about 150 people but in the winter swells to thousands due to all the RVers that make it their headquarters. During January and February it hosts the biggest RV show in the United States, along with vendors that supply anything you could ever want for a motorhome. It's also a rock hounder's paradise and home to a lot of desert rats. It's a wonderful place to spend time and we'll be doing that again this winter. We park out in the desert on BLM land and usually spend anywhere from two to four weeks there. We're self-contained with solar panels on the roof, so we can go about 10 days before we have to take on water and dump the tanks. It's SO relaxing. Anyway, enough on that. I kind of got off on a tangent there, didn't I. Sorry.

On to today's tasks. Ole will finish up fixing the satellite. (By the way, Art, it takes a special satellite to run the internet service. One that both receives and transmits. The satellite that we get TV reception on only receives.) Then he'll service the batteries, clean the solar panels, load the tanks with water (150 gallons) and by that time I should have clothes and food packed. Hopefully, if everything goes right for Ole, we'll be out of here tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed.

Frustration and Overwhelmedness

Well, Folks, our target date for departure for points west has been set back so you'll just have to put up with me for a couple more days. You know, things just never go according to plan, so I've decided it's probably just best not to make any definite plans. It's a good thing we're not on a tight schedule - one advantage of Ole being retired.

Ole brought the motor home up to the house so he could start loading and I could start cleaning. THAT's when we discovered several problems. After we returned from our trip to the U.P. of Michigan last fall, we brought the RV into the Freightliner dealer in town to have a couple of things taken care of. Of course they didn't get to it right away and it had to sit outside. It got to be into November before they got around to it and by this time the temps were quite cold. Cold enough to freeze one of the water lines and crack it. Well, now, normally fixing a cracked water line wouldn't be a big deal for Ole, but when you look at how things are put together in an RV - so compact and tight and covered up with umpty-two layers of something else - it became quite a feat to accomplish. First it took him a day to take things apart and just find it. Then he had to play contortionist to get into the small space to put in a new line, then another whole day (almost) to put all the parts and pieces back together that he had taken apart to get at the leak. NOTHING is ever easy. And just imagine - he didn't end up with any pieces left over! That's a major accomplishment.

THEN he discovered that Freightliner had broken a key off in one of the door locks. And they never even told us about it. Fortunately there are two locks on the door, but still!!! Because we never keep anything locked around here we didn't discover the broken key until now when Ole was checking things out. So that's ANOTHER thing that has to be fixed before we leave.

Today he's up on the roof fixing the satellite dish so we can have television. Some of the gears stripped off the thingie that operates the up and down part of it, so THAT's got to be fixed. And things always take longer than what you initially think they will.

Now me? I've got my own share of problems. One of the things I have done in the past is to hook my laptop up to the internet through my cell phone when we're on the road. Because I had to reformat the hard drive here a couple of months ago, I lost all those cell phone setting and the appropriate software. I've got the software installed, etc., but had trouble getting the computer to recognize the cell phone. After several hours of putzing around I finally got that figured out, but it still won't make a call. So I've done something else wrong. Guess I'll have to give Big Brother a call this afternoon and hopefully he can walk me through what's going on. He's got the same cell phone, same mobile office software and same laptop I do, so I'll just have him look at his settings and we'll go from there.

One feather in my cap though - because I'm just not the brightest light bulb in the box when it comes to computer hardware - I did manage to get the GPS hooked up and operating. That's a fun thing to do - I've got some software on my computer called Streets and Trips. It's just like having a very detailed topographical/highway map on your computer. When the GPS is hooked up to the computer you can track your location and elevation on the computer screen. The software has this little red car that drives along the road, up and down the hills/mountains etc., by receiving a signal from a satellite. That way you always know where you're at - well, in OUR case, that's ALMOST ALWAYS!!

It really works better when I'm navigating and Ole is driving. Somehow I manage to give him directions well before he has to make a turn. We tried it once with me driving and him reading the map/computer. He gave me notice to turn when we were about 100 feet beyond the corner. After all, Ole says I've been telling him where to go for the last 40 years - why should it change now?? (that's a joke, People, laugh, okay?)

So today I have to make a Wally World run and lay in supplies, you know, snacks, coke, toilet paper - all those essentials. Yeah, I know, there's Wally Worlds all over and I could stop at one of them, but it's so much easier to do it at home and be done.

Yesterday I took Senior Citizen Simon to the vet to get his shots updated and get a health certificate for him so he can travel with us. This will definitely be a new experience for him because he's been a real homebody all his life with the exception of going to the vet. He was such a good boy - squawked a bit on the way into town because he doesn't like to be confined in a crate. But once I got him to the vet, up on the table and let him out of the crate he sat there like a prince during the entire exam and shots. He's a svelt 14.5 pounds. The vet took one look at him and said, "Even though he's getting old I guess you don't have any trouble getting him to eat?" Nope - he wakes me regularly every morning about six and wants to be fed his canned cat food even though he's got a whole feeder of dry stuff sitting there. No lack of nutrition for that boy!!

I've had him out in the RV a number of times, sprinkled catnip all over and let him explore. He's quite a nosy old guy, busy opening cupboard doors and exploring the nether worlds of all the nooks and crannies. So we'll see what kind of a hiding place he'll find when we start moving. Petunia, the kitty that I lost last summer, always settled down under the davenport in a little hidey-hole when the RV would start moving. Then when we stopped she'd come out squawking for something to eat.

She was a real trooper and traveled with us for a number of years before we lost her last summer at Sturgis. You all remember Jane in some of my previous writing. Well, even though I had a sign posted on the door of the RV that there was a cat inside and please keep the door closed, Jane thought she had to stand in a half open door and talk to me and of course Petunia took that opportunity to slip through and escape. Everybody at our campsite grabbed their flashlights and started searching - everybody with the exception of Jane, of course. She wanted to go to the Full Throttle Saloon and sat in a chair and pouted because Dick and everybody else was busy helping me try to find Petunia. Oh well, maybe I'll be lucky and see her sitting in the window of another RV this time around. Wouldn't that be something? I just want to know what happened to her. Not knowing is so awful.

Well, I guess I better move my body and make that trip to town (groan).

And the Results are In??

Lovely Daughter and the New Man went down to the fair last night and picked up all our entries. As I expected, I didn't do as well as last year.

This one got a blue ribbon:

This one got a white ribbon (third place):

This one also got a white ribbon:

And this one didn't get anything:

The New Man had never been to a county fair before and seemed to really enjoy the experience. First we went to the demolition derby. I haven't been to one for years and all the smashing and banging was pretty exciting. There was one gal that entered the derby, a pretty aggressive gal. And you could tell that she had done this before. She did very well - made it to the last heat and came in second place. The night before they had a combine demolition derby - you know, those big machines that harvest grain in the field? I wish I had seen that. We'll have to make a point of going to that next year. Here's a picture that a friend of mine took:

Here's a couple shots of the demo derby we went to. One poor guy had his gas tank explode and start on fire. He baled out the window very quickly, but it took the firemen a bit of time to get the fire out. Fortunately the drivers are only allowed to carry a small amount of gas, a gallon or so.

Then we had to hit the animal barns. It's always so much fun to see all the 4-H kids working with their animals. Most generally they've raised these animals from when they were babies so they follow their owners around like little puppies and cry when their owners leave the pens. Many of the kids sleep right in the pens with their animals at night, just for security purposes.

First there were the sheep barns:

And of course the pig pens:

And the horse barns:

You could tell that a lot of the horses were "peopled out" as when we would walk up to their stalls they'd turn their back sides to us. Or then maybe it was just US they didn't like!!

And then there were the baby ducks:

And of course we couldn't leave without hitting the midway. This being a small county fair, the midway wasn't very big, but it's still a great place to people watch.

And after a funnel cake and some cheese curds it was time to go home (yawn).