The last two-plus days have continued our record of uninterrupted fun. Wednesday we stayed in Cody, logging a total of 21 miles in the car. After a fine breakfast, we went to a city park and started Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. We're one-fourth of the way through it and are hooked by Grey's powerful writing as he unwinds a plot involving characters with great moral issues as well as strategic problems. While we sat there, the local high school let out for lunch, and we watched the newly freed students race across the park to the fast-food places on the main drag. One of them unleashed the quote of the week, after a classmate made the mistake of uttering a profanity: "Shut your fucking mouth! You're a goddam Mormon!" That pretty much sums up the cultural dynamic in Cody, Wyoming.
Linda was craving a small steak and sought the advice of someone at the hospital where she got dialysis. We followed that suggestion and had the best restaurant meal of the trip, at the Wyoming Rib and Chop House. Linda got a 10-ounce filet, and I had salmon cooked over a cedar plank. Both were perfectly cooked and delicious, and Linda savored every bite of it, even the three she shared with me. We combined to tackle the biggest baked potato we've ever seen, two or three pounds' worth, as big as Richard Dreyfuss' mashed-potato sculpture of the Devil's Tower in "Close Encounters." We went ten rounds with it, but lost on points.
From there we went to the local Albertson's, which had everything we wanted for our planned Thursday picnic in the parks, and dropped the food off at our motel room refrigerator. Talked a bit with a quartet of Australians who had their Harleys shipped to the States and have been on the road more than six weeks. Now that's quite a way to explore a foreign country! One of them has been here before and is serving as their guide, and we tried to help him talk his mates into spending a couple of days around San Francisco in order to visit Muir Woods if nothing else. I hope they make it.
We finished the evening by driving eight miles out to Buffalo Bill State Park to take in the sunset. The sky was huge with billowing clouds and it promised to be a colorful sunset. We pulled up our chairs to watch, and I took a half-dozen photos, some of which I am now able to share with you.
But when we felt rain drops, we realized that the clouds above us were getting darker, and the yellow-orange prelude to the anticipated sunset was all the show we were going to get. It got dark pretty quickly, so we headed back to our room for the night.
We were up early yesterday morning and hit the road not long after 7am. It was a three-hour drive to our Yellowstone target--Old Faithful. Along the way we saw a bull elk with enormous antlers cavorting at the edge of Yellowstone Lake, and two buffaloes who confounded traffic by sauntering up a long hill in the uphill lane. It's a curving road, and to pass you had to squeeze to the left edge and hope nobody was coming the other way. That was a 15-minute delay, but it wasn't as funny as Tuesday evening on that same road, when four buffaloes strode downhill as if they had spent a tough day entertaining tourists and were headed for the nearest pool hall. They had even read the guidelines about facing traffic if you're a pedestrian. When we left them, a big bus not far behind us was heading toward the curve they had almost reached, and we flashed our high beams at three vehicles coming up the hill and subject to come around a curve and find four buffaloes and a bus coming at them. The buffaloes really do own that park.
Our arrival at Old Faithful was timed well, and we had only a twenty-minute wait before the eruption. I took only two still photos but got most of the show on the movie option on my camera. I think that might be more entertaining than the cliched stills. It was a relatively short eruption, but we weren't sticking around for the next one. We had other places to go. First we stopped at the Lewis Lake picnic area (near the southern edge of Yellowstone) for our picnic lunch, and got within two bites of finishing before it started to rain. But as we headed south, we left the rain behind us, and the rest of the day was beautiful.
Yes, we went back to the same spot we had stopped at two days earlier. We set up our lawn chairs and spent two hours there in that beatific spot, reading Zane Grey. By doing that, it meant we wouldn't be going to Jackson Hole, about a 45-minute drive south of our spot. That's each way, so it was either my favorite place in the country--a place I don't know when I'll visit again--for two hours or a quick tour of Jackson Hole. We enjoyed our reading very much.
It was 4:30pm by the time we checked into our cabin, built in 1930 and just fine for our purposes. Took a brief nap and headed for dinner at the restaurant in Colter Bay. It was a more expensive menu than we anticipated, since we weren't all that hungry. The best thing was the appetizer sampler, which included spare ribs, honey habanero chicken wings, fried pickles, and potato wedges, served with three dipping sauces that were very tasty. But the high point of the meal was the #2 quote of the week. I won't tell you where Jeff is from, but after spending two summers at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, he's finishing his summer in the Tetons as an assistant waiter. That means he does a lot of schlepping and pouring water. The water in western Wyoming is the best I've ever had, and I was quite thirsty after the long day. I went through about three glasses of water in five minutes, and Jeff was slow keeping up with me until he realized the problem. "They got no business," he told us, "givin' a grown man a child's glass." But he kept filling it and filling it, and we were buddies by the sixth or seventh glass. Linda and I had a lot of questions for him about working in the national parks, and he said he might give it up after this summer. "I'm a house painter in real life," he said, "and I'm going to be moving to Texas and probably work full-time. I'm a Republican and I'm going to live there with all the other right-thinking people." He chuckled and added, "I don't even look left when I'm driving." He could sense that we might be the type who didn't look right when we drive, and added that "this is what makes this country so great, that we can think different things." End of that discussion.
After a relaxing evening in our cabin, we ended Thursday with a ten-minute excursion to the darkest place we could find, to see the brightest sky I've seen in a long time. Many times, I've seen huge night skies in the West, and though we couldn't see the whole sky from this area filled with tall pines, this was one of the best ever. The Milky Way looked thick and mysterious, and only the night chill kept us from staying out there much longer.
Daytime temperatures were in the 80s or higher during our Wyoming thus far, but it got cold in the woods at Colter Bay last night, and it was 47 this morning when we hit the road at 7:30am. This was our first excursion in the Tetons before noon, and it made a huge difference. The mountains are on the west side of the park, and at their best when catching the morning light. No glare, but rather the crisp outlines of the imposing, proud mountains against the blue sky. I took a few photos at Colter Bay and then we headed for--of course, our favorite place by Jenny Lake. We stopped at the Jenny Lake Lodge for a light breakfast of bagels and cream cheese, then took that one-way road that leads along the eastern side of the lake. We lingered at our reading spot for a few photos which I think are the most spectacular we've taken on the trip so far. Somehow, Jenny Lake was perfectly still long enough for me to take photos with full reflections of the mountains. Fantastic!
But right now I have to finish this up and join Linda. She had a very good treatment today, is feeling chipper, and is the first of our twosome to head for the whirlpool tub at the Casper Marriott Courtyard. Life is good, and tomorrow we head for Colorado, though not before paying homage to our friend the jackalope. Stay tuned for that story!
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