Jace's Summer Vacation Part 4 - the Cowboy State Earns It's Name

We escaped Colorado with my health relatively intact (hey, no pulmonary aneurysm is a win!), Wyoming was next on our list, specifically Cody, Wyoming; home of Buffalo Bill and relatively close by to the East entrance to Yellowstone National Park.

The trip northward was surprisingly beautiful once we got off the interstate, with a few changes in elevation that didn't give me or the RV any issues. We also drove through a beautiful canyon inside the Wind River Indian Reservation which brought us along side a river and went through a few narrow and low hanging tunnels – just to keep me honest.

Cody, WY is a small city/town in the middle of nowhere (which I believe describes many areas within Wyoming), but has managed to maintain a vibrancy due to it's relative closeness to Yellowstone and to it's being the home of Buffalo Bill Cody. Many of you likely learned about Buffalo Bill Cody in history class growing up, but in this area, he's practically deified. Not that that's a bad thing mind you, but a little Buffalo Bill Cody goes a long way. When you're inundated with him for almost a week . . .

Anyway, they have a very nice museum covering his life and accomplishments, but it also includes a naturalist and conservation set of wings that highlight the importance of preserving the remaining open spaces in the area and across America. It features a raptor show that Jace loved, and he got to sit in an actual eagle's nest!

One of a few teepees in front of the Buffalo Bill Museum

Could this be the elusive Jace Eagle?

Jace coming up a bit short on the wingspan of a Golden Eagle

You'll find that when you travel to many isolated small towns out West which have some measure of historical value such as Deadwood, SD, Tombstone, AZ, or Cody, WY, there is the ubiquitous gunfight street show. The first two towns I mentioned try to recreate an historical event such as the Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone or the Showdown on Gold Street in Deadwood. Cody had no such historical gunfight, but they had a street gunfight show anyway.

So here's the thing: It's free (unless you want to pay $3.00 to rent a chair – suckers that we are, we did) and it's worth every penny. The problem is that when you have nothing on which to base your 20 minute play, it's tough to write a good play. It also didn't help that the sound quality was pretty poor. That being said, it was campy enough to be fun. The other nice thing about travel out West is their overt show of patriotism and respect for those who serve our nation and their community as evidenced by their prelude to the show itself.

Yellowstone National Park was the reason why we were visiting Wyoming in the first place. As there are few camping opportunities in the park itself (limited spaces in total and very few spots that would take an RV our size), we opted to stay outside the park. We could have stayed closer to the West entrance to the park which was closer to the attractions within, but you actually end up staying in Montana. So we opted for Twin Peaks campground equidistant to Cody and the East entrance to Yellowstone.

A visit to Yellowstone National Park is a must for anyone who loves to experience the outdoors. It features some of the most gorgeous scenery in the US, gives the visitor the opportunity to see wildlife up close and personal on a good day, and let's the visitor see some of the most incredible natural geysers in the world. Old Faithful did NOT disappoint. We were able to get to the area with about 20 minutes to spare before it's “scheduled” eruption, and got a decent view without obstruction. The anticipation as it builds is exciting; there's movement for about 3-5 minutes before the actual eruption, so the excitement builds as each burble underground comes to the surface.

 

Pretty cool!

Jace was given a kid's guide to the park at the entrance, and the goal was to find as many animals in the guide was you possibly could – 20 animals in all. It said that if you found more than 7, you were doing good. In our two days in the park Jace was able to find 12, one with the help of a nice lady who had a telescope on a tripod and showed Jace his first and only elk.

As beautiful as Old faithful was, I found the most spectacular feature in the park to be the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. Nowhere near the size of THE Grand Canyon, but it's steep cliffs and roaring waterfalls are a sight to behold.

Jace wading in Lake Yellowstone. He had to be carried into the water because we didn't bring his water shoes, and the shoreline is loaded with very sharp rocks!

One of the coolest things about the drive through Yellowstone is the ability to cross over the Great Continental Divide, separating one side of the Rocky Mountains from the other. Fortunately, we weren't at altitude long enough for it to affect me in any negative way.

 

Our journey back and forth from our campground to Cody took us past Buffalo Bill Dam, up until a few years ago the highest dam in the world. We stopped In at the visitors center they have on-site, took a quick tour and watched video of the very interesting history of it's difficult construction; not only due to it's proposed height, but due to the private companies involved that were ill-suited to constructing a dam in the first place! The results were ultimately good for the area with control of the river and the creation of Buffalo Bill Cody Lake.

Our final night in the Cody area found us getting a quick supper at the local DQ, where they had the most interesting kids seating available. It was then onto the Cody Stampede Rodeo, held each and every night at 8:00 from June thru August. Another beautiful recognition of America and the people who served it, followed by local talent performing in various riding and roping competitions. At one point they asked all kids in attendance to come down onto the ring and participate in a chase for a few ribbons attached to small cows. Needless to say, Jace had a blast, even if he never got near a cow!

 

A saddle seat in a Wyoming DQ? Sure, why not?

 

Jace getting excited to see his first rodeo

Jace on the field with all the other kids waiting to chase cows. What could be better than that?

Our last stop in Wyoming was going to be at Devil's Tower in the east, but getting there proved to be a bit of a challenge. Leaving Cody, we found ourselves on a gradual decline in elevation, so gradual I hardly noticed it. We got to a small town called Tensleep with a river running through it, and saw that our only route to Devil's Tower was going to have to climb up and over a particular mountain range with 10,000 feet of elevation ahead of us. Now, I can maintain some pretty good speeds going uphill so long as I keep my gas pedal to the floor, but once I get into switchbacks and hairpin turns I have to slow down, and I can NEVER regain my speed until I crest the mountain. That meant that after the first reversal in the road, I was down to 25-30 MPH no matter how straight the road became – for more than 35 interminable minutes. The motor home's engine was getting a real workout going up, and people behind us weren't very happy with me because if I ever used one of the few turnoffs, my best speed from a standing stop would have been about 15 MPH.

Worse yet was the drive downhill. No matter how much I used the engine and downshifting to keep my speed safe, I had to use my brakes – a lot. Got so that my tire pressure management monitor starting singing out high temp warnings on my front tires about 2/3rds of the way down the mountain. We're talking temperatures exceeding 150 degrees, and pressures beginning to run into the high range as well. I found a long pull off where we had lunch and I waited for the pressure and temperatures to start dropping back to normal, but nothing was happening. Finally, I decided that Mother Nature needed a bit of help (it WAS a warm day), so I got a 5-gallon bucket out of my basement bay, filled it with water from our fresh tank, and started pouring over the tires. The water would literally steam away as it hit any metal and dry instantly when it hit the tires. After about 20 minutes and 10 or so buckets of water, the tires were near enough to normal that we could get back on the road. We still had another 15 minutes of descent, but I used the engine to downshift almost exclusively.

Arriving at Devil's Tower campground and restaurant, we had a small and fairly un-level pull through site with electrical hookups only for $50, but it was the closest campground to the Tower except for the much higher priced KOA at the base on the mountain. It also claimed to have the best bison burgers in the state. Truth be told, they were very good!

If you ever watched 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' back in the '70's, Devil's Tower became famous in that film as a base for aliens from outer space. It's a very weird and very striking butte in the middle of nowhere, rising almost 900 feet from base to summit. You can climb it if you're younger and in much better shape, but we were just happy to see the monolith up close from the base. No alien spacecraft were spotted during our time there.

 

At the entrance to the park, prairie dogs are all over the place. Thousands of them make their nests in fields next to the access road.

Wyoming was to give way to our “home” state of South Dakota, but that's for our next report in Parental Parolees.

Jace's Summer Vacation 2025 - Part 4 - A Rocky Mountain High

So Oklahoma was very good, Amarillo, TX was a bit disappointing, and now it's time to move to a state neither Barbara and I nor Jace has ever visited – Colorado.

The trip to Colorado Springs, CO was a pretty scenic one out the front windshield, especially as we approached our first views of the Rocky Mountains. We started getting into some real elevations once we began cutting the corner of New Mexico on our way to get to I-25 – the main road northward in that part of the country. The motor home was handling the changes pretty well, and outside of some construction areas, we maintained good speed heading higher and higher.

Our KOA (Falcon) in Peyton, CO northeast of Colorado Springs was an easy 25 minute ride to the city and about an hour to Pike's Peak, our primary sightseeing destination of many in the area. The park is new, pretty nice, with very level lots. A little weird in their setup for water and sewer, because the utilities were situated in a 4'x4' raised boxed-in bed of rocks. Not small rocks, either, but at least fist-sized. It made for difficult balancing when working my way under the slide to handle wet bay work. A bit pricey for a “resort” that didn't have a pool and only had a playground designed for smaller kids younger than Jace, but it was the only place available for the July 4^th holiday.

I'm spending some time writing about elevation in this blog post, because I began to feel pretty bad just hours after arriving at our campground. Started doing some research, and found out I was likely suffering some of the classic symptoms of High Altitude Sickness. Fatigue, elevated heart rate (over 140 bpm vs. my usual 85 bpm), and a bit of dizziness. Couldn't sleep more than an hour or two without waking up from the reduced levels of oxygen. Had to sleep sitting up most of the time. I looked at some of the do's and don't's when suffering from H-A-S, and one of the things was to avoid even higher elevations, as in some cases an aneurysm could possibly occur in the brain. Minor problem – I had already purchased 3 tickets on the cog railway going up to the summit of Pike's Peak for the very next day! Plus, the park we were staying in sat at 6,600 ft above sea level, and that elevation was going to stay the same or go even higher for extended periods for the NEXT 3 WEEKS!

Needless to say, my trip to Pike's Peak at 14,200 feet above sea level was no longer in the cards. As the doctor I saw later at the VA in Denver told me, I might have gone up on the train, but I might have come back down in an ambulance or a life flight. However, nothing was keeping Barbara and Jace from enjoying that part of the trip. Jace made friends with kids and adults on the train ride up and down, and they both got to enjoy Pike's Peak weather at it's finest; upon arrival at the summit it was snowing – in early July – then changed to sleet for a few minutes and then changed over to a light rain. By the time they were ready to head back down, it was bright and sunny!

 

While I was feeling miserable from High Altitude Sickness back at the RV, Jace and Barbara were "enjoying" near freezing temperatures and sleet at over 14,00 feet at the summit of Pike's Peak!

Snow still at the top of Pike's Peak in early July.

Jace holding court on the train ride back down the mountain. No one remains a stranger whenever Jace is nearby.

The next day we determined that I had to see a physician about the High Altitude Sickness, so we drove about an hour and a half to Denver, which had the nearest VA Emergency Room. When traveling under VA care, you have to present yourself at one of their Emergency Rooms in order to get transferred from one state's VA system into another state's VA system, or if there isn't a Veterans Administration ER nearby, you can just go to a local civilian ER under their Community Care program. I usually opt for the VA facility just to keep the records of my visits in-house.

The doctor was very nice and extremely thorough, especially given the symptoms I was experiencing. He insisted on a CT scan of my head to make sure an aneurysm wasn't in my future, and gave me a prescription that would reduce the volume of fluid in my brain which might alleviate some of my symptoms. Veterans in Denver are very lucky to have such a campus to handle their healthcare.

So with the prescription helping a bit – fatigue was still an ongoing issue as the prescription wasn't designed to lower the heart rate – we managed a drive through Garden of the Gods. It was nice, but it would have been better had I been able to do some hiking instead of staying on the road which circles the formations.

 

Not the views I was hoping for at Garden of the Gods, but it was still pretty cool to see these weird rock formations.

Our final destination in Colorado was a couple of hours drive away to visit the Royal Gorge, just west of Canon City. It was formed by the Arkansas River, and is a very deep (1,250 feet) and very narrow (just 50 feet in some places) cut through the area. It also features a suspension bridge which was the world's highest bridge until 2001. The walk across the bridge can be a bit daunting with some not-insignificant spacing between some of the wooden planks, especially if you're not fond of heights (as one of our party was, but they made it). If you do venture to the railing and look down, squinting will get you a view of rafters navigating the Arkansas River approximately 900 feet below. Yeah, it's quite the drop.

 

The Royal Gorge Suspension Bridge sitting over 900 feet above the Arkansas River.

The view looking over the railing and down towards the Arkansas River. I would have gotten a more downward view, but I didn't want to risk losing my phone!

 

Jace enjoyed a fantastic playground on-site and saw some Bighorn sheep up close and running wild. The park also had a nice activity book for the kids to puzzle out a word after finding clues around the various attractions. We ended up taking a gondola ride back across the gorge (instead of braving the bridge again) to their visitor center and exit. All-in-all, a fitting end to our Colorado adventure.

 

If you zoom in on this photo, you'll see that it's not just a bunch of rocks in the background. Those are Bighorn Sheep nestled in the rocks. They just walk casually across the pathways to get to "their" spot whenever they want; you just need to keep a respectful distance from them.

Next stop – Wyoming. But how much of THAT planned trip was I going to be able to enjoy? Find out next in Parental Parolees!

Jace's Summer vacation 2025 Part 3 - OK and TX

Heading further west, we find ourselves in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Our research indicated that they had a great interactive Science Museum in town, and a Cowboy Museum that shouldn't be missed.

It also had a Safelite shop that could replace our shattered rear window.

So first things first, get that window replaced. Had an early appointment I had made a few days earlier so that the window could be ordered in advance, and the technician got right to it. He wasn't hopeful that he could get all the glass removed from between the outer and inner layers of the rear hatch, but he said he'd try his best. Apparently some Jeep models have a very limited access to that area. Got it back about 40 minutes later, and he told me that I had one of the Jeep models where the access was better than most, and the annoying rattle of glass moving from the bottom of the hatch to the top when opened was virtually gone!

Job 1 is done, so now it's time for Jace.

The Science Museum was everything as advertised, and more. Completely built from the ground up to appeal to kids, and everything is interactive, so it's hands on all day long. Jace enjoyed climbing, making air flow, making electricity and lighting up a series of bulbs that went from floor to 60-foot ceiling. Water experiments, tornado creation, riding out an earthquake, plus a planetarium to view the stars. He didn't want to leave, and neither did we, but there were still things to enjoy – like the pool back at the RV resort.

 

Six degrees of Jace. Different time lapse views all at once.

 

Oklahoma and North Texas share a bit of Americana; that being the old Rt 66 of fame and fortune. Much of it has been paved over by new Interstate highways, but some of it still exists. One place near our campground wasn't part of the original Rt 66, but it was created in it's image. Pop's Soda Shop hearkens back to the days of Rt 66, with plenty of neon lights, typical grill food and shakes so thick you think the sides of your head are going to collapse in on each other when you use a straw. It also has more than 100 different flavors of soda pop made by dozens of vendors you never heard about before in their expansive refrigerator.

 

It doesn't look like we were all having fun, but we were!

Just a fraction of the soda selection at Pops. All very unique flavors, too!

Wasn't quite dark enough to get the full lighted effect, but you get the idea.

 

I have to admit that I wasn't sure how Jace would take to the Cowboy Museum; frankly, I wasn't sure how I would take to it. But it turned out to be a great afternoon for everybody. Real-life cowboys and their lifestyle were featured, but also TV and movie western cowboys had their own display room. There were quizzes on various western themes such as famous western sidekicks (both real and on-screen). We did pretty poorly on that quiz, but we just about aced the quiz on western TV theme songs. In the gift shop, we bought Jace on of those kids cowboy hats we used to wear long ago for just $10, and it turned out to be the best $10 we spent on the entire trip! Hardly as day has gone by on the vacation where he wasn't wearing that hat.

 

Restored Wells Fargo stagecoach

Jace in Cowboy Jail.

Out front wearing his new cowboy hat.

Oklahoma gave way to Amarillo, Texas, again with some Rt 66 stops in mind, but frankly, it was a disappointing side of the trip except for one stop. We stayed at the Big Texan RV Resort, and it was nice enough (especially the large bounce pad they had), but the Big Texan Steakhouse it was associated with did not meet expectations. After all, when in Texas you expect to get premium quality beef, but their filets were substandard; we get better at every Texas Roadhouse we eat at. The only real plus was our waiter, Caleb, who absolutely adored Jace and treated him like a king.

The Cadillac Ranch nearby – a waste if time. Frankly, our resort had a better display of painted, half-buried cars up front. The old Rt 66 shopping “district” was one street taken over largely by biker bars (fully occupied in the morning) and tattoo shops. Pretty scary, so we passed right by it.

 

Our RV resort had a much better painted car display out front!

Cadillac Ranch was pretty lame.

The only good stop in the Amarillo area was Palo Duro Canyon, America's second largest canyon. It doesn't have the colors and depth of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, but it still has some breathtaking views. What's really nice about Palo Duro is that you can drive down into it, dropping 800ft to the canyon floor. There are a few campgrounds in the canyon as well, but I can tell you from driving the descent down to the canyon in a car, I wouldn't want to take our motorhome down that road!

Beautiful vista at the top of Palo Duro Canyon

Jace and I ventured onto the Big Cave Trail for a relatively short (and mercifully easy) climb into a very large cave, where of course Jace encountered the only dog in the cave who had also made the hike with his owners.

Dog in the cave? Of course Jace is going to find one!

The view before Jace and I hiked up to the cave.

Our next destination in Jace's summer vacation was going to prove to be a problem – a big problem. But that's for my next post.