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KOA campground, Cody, Wyoming, Tachometer – 4480 miles

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We drove 200 miles today on our quest to Yellowstone. We stopped at Cody for a rodeo and tomorrow we will finally hit the national park.

Our day started with a long beautiful drive through the Big Horn mountain range. Temperatures dropped and it was raining heavily as we climbed up the mountain. We even passed by some snow patches. We then descended to a relatively boring drive through farmland, with nice sunny weather accompanying us. We stopped for lunch in a random town of Burligton, where we rested and had fun on the lawn of the local Mormon church (thank you).

We got to Cody in the early afternoon and sped off to the swimming pool with the kids. Of the three pools on site, we chose the smallest one, which was the warmest. It turns out it was a hottub. After that we prepared some teriyaki chicken on the grill and had an early dinner.

Paola and the girls stayed behind while Ron and I took a shuttle bus from the campground to the world famous Cody Night Rodeo. It is a nice real rodeo that is put on every night during the summer months for the amusement of locals and tourists alike. Ron and I enjoyed watching the bareback horseriders, calf ropers, bull riders etc…It was interesting to see that many women were participating, although in their own events. There was one lady who did a bull ride but was thrown off the second it shot out of the gate. There were also lots of kids doing the same stuff on younger animals, including steer (young bull) riding.

For those unfamiliar like we are, the idea of a rodeo is to show off skills that cowboys actually may need on the ranch, though I doubt anyone needs to ride a bull. You get on a bull, use just one hand to hold on to a makeshift saddle, and stay on for 8 seconds while the animal twists hops and turns trying to throw you off. If you fall, it will usually try to poke you with its horns. That’s why they have rodeo clowns to distract the bull.

The show lasted for about two hours. Ron was getting really tired towards the end, but he surprised me and did not fall asleep on the bus back to the campground. He even insisted we look at the pictures on the computer before he goes to sleep. He is also very excited about tomorrow. He has been talking about Yellowstone since we began our trip over a month ago. Why Yellowstone? We don’t know. Maybe he learned about it in school or heard from a friend.

Good night,

-Hemi

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 7:30 am and is filed under Big Trip, North America RV 2007, Wyoming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.