One more day of vacation down...7 more to go. With all that's happened on this trip so far, it feels like we left St Louis weeks ago. After yesterday's disastrous morning, we didn't get on the road until about 10:30. This is what happens when your kiddo only gets 8 hours of sleep the night before (which, incidentally, I would KILL for right now):
Naps before 9:00 a.m. Aren't they cute?? Guess which member of the family didn't get a nap, though? You got it. This girl. Because despite the fact that our camper has plenty of sleeping options - it's a very nice RV, really - the couch was taken by these two, the bed was full of crap we didn't want to get wet on the floor, the bunk above the cab had a bunch of miscellaneous junk in it, and the two dogs were occupying the driver and passenger seats. So my options at that point were, a) sleep on a table, or b) sleep on the damp and very dirty floor. The table was out, and since I wasn't really keen on getting bronchitis from inhaling the floor fumes I passed on a nap. I'm sure I'll get one today after getting up at 5:15 again, right? Hahahaha. Right.
We left South Dakota and motored on into Wyoming. We stopped at a very nice rest area as soon as we got into WY and picked up a map to figure out the best way to get to Devils Tower and where we might want to stop to get lunch along the way. There was a very nice lady at the campground that we had just left who told us to stop in a town called Aladdin to eat lunch and check out a very old general store. Which is what we had planned on doing, but fortunately we asked about this tiny (and I mean TINY) town at the WY rest area, because we needed gas and guess how many people live in the town? 15. In Wyoming, the least populated state in the U.S., 15 people constitutes a whole town. So the lady at the rest stop couldn't guarantee there was a gas station there. Another crisis crisis barely averted! Pat is always pushing the limits on the gas tank whenever we drive anywhere long distance, but usually we are within 10 miles or so of a gas station. In this part of the country you could literally go hundreds of miles without there being a place to fuel up. So instead of Aladdin, we stopped in Sundance, which at pop. 1,000 seemed like a booming metropolis compared to that other place. This is where Billy the Kid is from...don't ask me what he is famous for exactly. Killing people or stealing or gambling or something cool like that.
Next stop: Devils Tower! This is a natural phenomenon I had never heard of. It apparently is a huge rock formation that was formed many, many years ago that crazy people occasionally climb up. It was actually the fist National Monument in America. Native American folklore says it was formed when 7 sisters climbed atop a tree stump to get away from their brother (in the form of a bear) who was trying to attack them. Sounds like something that would have happened in the Wesselmann family back in the day! Run for your lives, Bev, Theresa, Connie and Deb!! ;)
And those little squirrel-y looking dudes are prairie dogs, which all over the place in the Devils Tower National Park.
After driving for about 2 hours to get to DT and spending about 20 minutes there (Olivia conveniently fell asleep as we were pulling into the park), we started the drive to our last stop of the day: Aunt Bev and Uncle Jerry's house. We were greeted with pink squirrels (no, not tye dyed rodents - a fancy, boozy ice cream drink) and...a kitty cat! Olivia officially has a new BFF, Jake. She chased this poor cat around Aunt Bev's house all night yanking on its tail and trying to coax it down from the windowsill to play with her. It was pretty cute to watch. But the best part of all was that I got to sleep in a REAL bed! With no dogs around to wake me up!! And no musty, wet-dog smell in my bedroom, which is now what the RV smells like 100% of the time. Awesome.
Time to get on the road again. Next stop...Montana!
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