Day 10:

We were hoping to leave at 9. We left at 11, which would have been 12 if we had waited in the long line of RVs to empty our sewage.

We drove back into the Grand Tetons to see something called the Chapel of the Transfiguration, which is a small wooden Episcopalian chapel built in 1925 to be a church for the dude ranchers and tourists visiting the Grand Tetons. Unfortunately we couldn't go inside because it was closed this summer due to Covid. Apparenlty, the altar has a window behind it that perfectly frames the Grand Tetons. I would love to have seen that.

Right by the chapel is a pathway that leads to the Menor's Ferry Historic District. Menor's Ferry Historical District has a few buildings that show the life of William Menor, a homesteader who settled on the banks of the Snake River sometimes between 1892 and 1894. He built a cabin, a general store and a ferry which charged 25 cents for a house and a wagon to get across the Snake River Channel that divided the Jackson Hole valley. There was a replica of the ferry boat that he used. The ferry boat pulls system is still there. Normally people can still take the ferry across and go inside his cabin and general store, but that was all closed this summer.

Then we went to see Mormon Row, a series of homesteads created by Mormon settlers from Idaho who moved to Jackson Hole in the 1890s. Only six of the original 33 homesteads remain, but many of them contain houses, barns, granaries, chicken coops, guest houses and bunkhouses. The US Post Office named the area Grovont, but now it is referred to as Mormon Row. There used to be a church and a school as well, but those are gone now. The community living set these Mormon homesteaders apart from most other Western homesteaders who were typically very isolated. Almost all of these homesteads were owned by people with the last name Moulton, which happens to be the maiden name of my great-grandmother. We are going to ask my Aunt Elise, our family's resident genealogist, to figure out if we are related to any of these Moultons.

If you are going to come all the way out to Yellowstone, make sure you save a day for the Grand Tetons. It's smaller and easier to visit and so beautiful. My mom pointed out that Yellowstone is better if you want to see things, but Grand Tetons is better if you want to do things like hike or swim or boat.

We have been extremely lucky with the weather. We have had mostly sunshine and temperatures in the upper 70s/low 80s every day. I have rarely felt too cold and rarely felt too hot, except at night in the RV where we can't seem to figure out how to control the temperature.

We stopped for lunch in a blink and you miss it town called Dubois. If I were driving and if we weren't worried about driving in the dark I would love to have stopped at National Bighorn Sheep Center in Dubois. We did stop for lunch at a fantastic pizza place called Noon Rock Pizza. Everyone was thrilled with their meal and we also had yummy ice cream for dessert. As usual, our lunch stop took much longer than we expected it to and our ETA for our next RV park in Casper, Wyoming, was 7 pm.

The drive was fairly uneventful until we entered a pretty significant dust storm. We only had to drive through it for about 7 minutes, but it was a long seven minutes. We couldn't even see well enough to pull over. Fortunately the car in front of us has its hazards on and we could see them. The problem was that we didn't know how to put our own hazards on. We never did figure it out and it wasn't really the moment to get out the manual. We made it through safely, but it was not fun.

We got to the KOA Bar Nunn, just north of Casper, Wyoming around 7:15. he RV park was small but clean and it had a lovely couple from Wisconsin at the front desk who told us they had just bought the RV park with some friends of theirs. The kids played a little mini golf and went in the pool for a bit before we went to dinner at a restaurant just behind the KOA called the Hangar, that was in an actual airplane hanger. The restaurant had the best French fries that tasted exactly the same as my favorite restaurant French fries in the world at the Silverado Grill in Elmhurst, IL. I asked our sever what the secret was and he said they were made from potatoes cut fresh that morning but he wouldn't tell me the rest of the recipe because it was a secret.

Before bed, the boys worked on their paint by sticker books, which have kept them very busy during the trip. They are books with all these stickers and you have to match them to the numbers of the pictures, like paint by numbers but with stickers. They are really cool.