Day 5: Buffalo,Wyoming to Cody,Wyoming

We drove through the historic main street of Buffalo which is best know for an old hotel called the Occidental where Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, and Calamity Jane have stayed. There is also a museum called the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum that is housed in an old Carnegie Library. Wanna know what Jim Gatchell did? You guessed it, he opened up the first drugstore in the county. I regret not going in, but we wanted to get going to Cody. We did have a bit of a problem when we tried to turn the RV around by going up a street with a very big incline. The overhead cupboards opened up and a deck of cards, a book, and a backpack fell on Luca's head. Thank goodness we had no steel water bottles up there. I think he was more surprised than injured.

We stopped in a town called Worland to go to the grocery story and then we made hot dogs in the RV and ate a park. We decided to visit the Washakie Museum in Worland on our way out of town. It had three exhibits, one about the ancient basin which had mammoth bones and some teeny tiny bones of an early primate called a Carpoleste, an exhibit called the Last West which taught us how the town of Worland was physically moved from one side of the river to the other over ice in order to be closer the railroad line, and another exhibit about the Women's suffrage movement in the US. Women actually received the right to to vote in the Wyoming Territory in 1869, which is way ahead of when most states granted women the right to vote and a full 51 years before the 19th amendment gave all US women the right to vote in 1920. One of the reasons was to entice women to come to Wyoming, where men outnumbered women six to one.

During women's history month every year, I usually read a fantastic picture book biography to the second graders called I Could Do That: Esther Morris Gets Women the Vote about how a woman named Esther Morris helped women get the right to vote in Wyoming and then became the first female judge in the United States in 1870. It's a great book about an important woman who made a difference in Wyoming.

We got to our Yellowstone RV park, the Yellowstone Valley Inn around 6:30 pm. It's a pretty basic RV park, but it is the second closest RV park to the West entrance of Yellowstone so what is lacking in charm is made up for in proximity. The bathrooms could certainly never be considered Comfort Stations and were rather dirty.

We were hoping to eat dinner at the RV park because the website advertises a saloon. The saloon was closed and the only food option was some $10 sandwiches. The woman at the front desk told us about a few restaurants up the road so we hopped back in the RV and looked for one.

We ended up at a place called the Trail Shop Inn, which curiously had neither a shop nor a trial. Every once in a while when you are on vacation you happen upon exactly what you need without planning it. The Trail Shop Inn ended up being that kind of place. The view was gorgeous. The food was amazing. The weather was perfect. The only other diners were a woman and her 14 year-old son who were living nearby for the summer. They were so sweet and the son, Quentin, a budding cowboy and bull rider, showed the boys how to use the lasso. When they left, another couple came and gave us some good tips about Yellowstone. They told us that we should go in as early as possible. We decided we would wake up around 6:30 to get to the park before the masses.

The kids ate pasta, my dad had fish and chips, Ellie had salmon, and and my mom and I shared the shrimp scampi. It was all fantastic.

There was a bit of excitement when we got back to the RV park because Ellie accidentally left her phone in the bathroom and it was gone when she went back to look for it. Fortunately the person who found it brought it to the front desk. We could all go to bed happy.