Cody, Wyoming and a Real Rodeo!

W e left South Dakota humorously excited to drive through Wyoming and knowing that night we will get to watch a real rodeo in Cody! The drive was not too bad... about 400 miles, and since there was nothing else to see in Rapid City this morning, we hit the road bright and early! As of now, more than halfway across the US, I have accumulated this nice collection of bugs and butterflies across my front bumper (even through the grille into the radiator). Poor little critters hitting the steel at 90+ mph... some splattered pretty hard.

(Noteworthy: our hotel in Rapid City boasted "a hot breakfast with real Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches"... yum, nothing like TWO microwaved, high-calorie and fatty frozen sandwiches to fuel me for the day).

Passing through the Wyoming state line, we stopped at a "tourism center" where I asked for directions as to the best way to cross a section of the Rocky Mountains standing between the Great Plains (where we were) and Cody. The kind old lady behind the counter told us of a very windy, high-grade road that is less traveled, and apparently offers a stupendous view "from which you can see all the way back to South Dakota." Wow. We also asked her what is a good place to stop for lunch

Her response: "Weelllll.... I love Applebees!" Hmm.

After a nice supersized meal at Wendy's, we continued driving across the big flats of Wyoming. Yes, there were hills, and grasslands, but for some reason it was kinda draining in a way that I did not feel in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, or Iowa, or S.Dakota. At some point I just had to pull over to make sure I was still alive... maybe it was the damn 1,000 calories from the lunch kicking up my liver in some struggle to turn into nice fatty tissue. Finally, we reached this highway to cross over the Bighorn Mountains... and saw... and smelled... this incredible fire. The entire sky at 2pm was yellow-brown. Hmm... winding, steep roads up the side of a mountain driving into a massive forest fire... excellent.

Luckily the road eventually skirted around the fire, and with less than 100 miles to Cody, we punched it to try and make up some time. Amazingly, the "outskirts" of Cody had NOTHING. It was like a scene in the middle of some Western cowboy film... rolling grasslands to the horizon with nothing else other than a super-straight, empty road in front of you. Needless to say it was a sight for sore eyes when we reached the town and our bed & breakfast (The Mayor's Inn).

Downtown Cody is super cute, and was a relatively long stretch of shops, restaurants, and ends with "Buffalo Bill's Museum." We stopped for a quick dinner at "The Outlaw Cafe", a casual place above a little souvenir shop. A small Asian woman came to take our orders. Amazingly, she is also the owner of the establishment -- she explained that she was originally from Hong Kong, made it big as an IT consultant in Oregon, and decided to go to the wild west as part of her retirement gig! Who would have known... she was super friendly, talked to us while we had a dinner of elk-meat sandwich and bbq buffalo flank.

The highlight of the town was, of course, the nightly rodeo! The show started with cowgirls riding around with large American flags (followed by all of the sponsoring company flags), singing of the national anthem, and even a public prayer for our troops. Then came various competitions for cowboys, cowgirls, and cowchildren(!) to hang onto their buckling horses, lasso the psycho cows, leap from their horses to wrestle down runaway cows... simply awesome. The individual contests were actually quite ferocious and exciting... at one point a cowboy was buckled from his horse only to have the buckling horse fall over and onto him... yikes. In an impressive display of skill, one reigning cowboy galloped from the starting line, lassoed a running cow, jumped off his horse, wrestled the cow to the ground, and tied up its four legs... in a matter of 8 seconds.