Outside our log cabin Carriage House
A slight miscalculation on day two led to an unrealistic expectation that we could pull a 13 or 14 hour drive (which would translate to a much longer day with an infant, two dogs and a cat). In choosing Cody, WY, we assumed we could find a pet-friendly room at a 3-star hotel.
We didn’t count on the nightly rodeo.
Evidently (and to the pride of the good people of Cody, Wyoming), Cody is home to nightly rodeos all summer long. As a result, rooms at the larger chain hotels and motels filled quickly.
We were recommended “Carriage House“.
The folks running the Carriage House were kind and helpful and they allowed our pets to stay inside. And given that we froze ourselves the night before camping in Montana, any four walls and a bathroom would have done.
This simply did.
Little Dude scaling our lamp inside Carriage House.
But we still froze (this time, there was no way to shut off the constant rush of cold air from the two ceiling vents). However, we had a comfortable bed, which was more than a step up from an uninflated air mattress.
Today would see us through more incredible landscape as we drove through Ten Sleep and Bighorn National Forest. But before we got a chance to get there we attempted to wrestle breakfast out of McDonalds in Cody.
Unfortunately for us, they stopped serving breakfast before 10:48am. “We’ve moved on to lunch.” was all we got from the drive through speaker. I was unimpressed. Not only that, but they advertised free internet and as much as I tried, I could not connect without them asking for a prepaid internet card, whatever that is. What the heck is a prepaid internet card?
So, our next stop with the KFC down the road. After ordering lunch, we attempted to hear the amount we owed for our food. What came out sounded like, “Ten diggy-dum-diggy-dum”. Funny thing was that Niki and I both heard it the same way. “Did she just say ‘ten diggy-dum-diggy-dum’?”
It didn’t stop there, either. When we pulled to the drive-thru window and Niki asked a seemingly simply question:
“Do you know where a Starbucks is?”
- pause -
“I don’t even know what that is!”
What happened next surprised me. My wonderfully sweet wife who very rarely utters a cross word to anyone, in her frozen-night-caffeine-deprived state of mind leans out the driver’s side window, both arms planted on the window, and asks incredulously, “Are you serious?“.
I laughed. Hard. Several times. Throughout the day. That was funny. This trip, other than our sleeping arrangements, rocks. We’ve laughed way too much, but there was so much material to choose from to laugh at. Good times…
Driving through Bighorn National Forest
Driving through Ten Sleep and Bighorn National Forest was eye candy. The topography was so completely different from Yellowstone. The crags and cliffs looked like they had been torn out by huge claws which dropped the chunks here and there along the river in the valley. Incredible.
The signs along the road identified the various geological time periods of the rocks’ supposed creation: Pennsylvanian, Cretacean, Precambrian. This was a very old place. And we raced through them in but a couple of hours.
Time travelers are we.
Further along in Bighorn
This was the most impressive view of the gorge we drove through. On the left, dolomites.
