July 14, 2013 Day five

Up before 6:00am and Patti caught the sunrise over the river.  Beautiful.   We also had a little visitor to our campsite before we left, a Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel.  These animals are much larger than the chipmunks they resemble. Today is one of our “long days” of driving.  About 12 hours in the car, nearly 600 miles.  Why so long?  We had to get over the Rocky Mountains and through Colorado and Wyoming into South Dakota.  These long drives are more fun for Dick than for Patti, but the scenery w as breathtaking.

A quick stop in Steamboat Springs CO gave us the chance to stop at a WorldMark resort (part of our timeshare system) and hook into their Wi-Fi.  Yah!  Steamboat Springs looks fabulous.  It goes unto our list of places to come back to at sometime in the future.

Dick works on blog

So what do we do during 12 hours of driving?  Thanks for asking.  Dick loves to watch the change of scenery and look for animals.  We have already had good animal karma on this trip having seen the following:  mule deer, golden mantle ground squirrels, chip monks, a couple of prong horn antelopes and their babies, bison, ostriches, ravens, quail, and rabbits. We continue to look for state license plates and are now up to about 30 states so far, plus several Canadian providences and two Mexican states.  Sometimes Patti takes out the laptop and works on writing the blog entries.  We have some books like The Ten Best Everything about National Parks that we read together.  We have some books on cd that we at least plan on listening to.  And we just take the time to enjoy being together and sharing our thoughts about what we have been seeing and doing.  And with our nice set up in the back of the minivan, it is possible for one of us to climb back and take nap while the other drives.

Our "plan" said that this was really just a long driving day, but the serendipity fairy brought us driving nearly by a couple of very cool historical sites, so, old history majors that we are, we HAD to stop.

First was to look at some actual wagon ruts from the Oregon Trail.  This was tracks that the wagon wheels made going over sandstone as some 500,000 people emegrated West by wagon or pushing hand carts.  It was really something to pause and imagine the route that took us about 12 hours (about 600 miles) today would have taken them  maybe 3- 3 1/2 months-especially to go over the Rocky Mountains.  And we thought that we were tired!

Then we saw the Register Rock where hundreds of people, starting back in the pioneer days of the 1850's, carved their names and dates on this large sandstone rock.  Of course, other people felt called upon to put their names there, up to present time, but you could still read many old names written in beautiful script.  Wow.  Again, a little trip back in time.  We were also really aware that even those carvings which no one touched or destroyed would only last a while, while the dinosaur fossilized bones we had just seen

were millions of years old.

The last stop was at Fort Laramie.  We thought this would be a quick zip in and out at a ruins, but instead it was a marvelously restored Fort with many, many buildings filled with wonderful artifacts, that is being curated by the National Park Service.  God bless those Parks people.  This fort was important as a stop on the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails, plus it was  a major stop on the Pony Express.  And there were many treaties with Native Americans form the plains area that were negotiated there.  We could have stayed for many hours, but had to settle with a briefer visit, but it was a highlight.

We pulled into a hotel in Hot Springs SD, just south of the Black Hills, just as the sun was setting, ready to get out of the car, and get ready for yet another fantastic adventurous day.

“Travel brings power and love back into your life.”
― Rumi