June 9th - Sheridan, Wyoming

We reluctantly packed up and left the Legion Lake campground to continue our journey west, but we carried with some really good memories of that campground and chats with Jim and Charlotte, the campground hosts. Custer State Park is definitely a park we want to return to. The drive across Wyoming was more interesting than we had expected. Once we were west of the Black Hills, the landscape dried out into arid savanna grasslands that had an increasing amount of sagebrush (I think). We were surprised to see extensive oil wells and the occasional refinery along the way, but despite the refineries and billboard advertisements over in South Dakota, gasoline was not noticeably cheaper in Wyoming! Wyoming also seems to favor gasoline with ethanol added, but occasionally a big-brand station like Exxon or Amoco would offer a low-octane version of regular gas without ethanol. I tried it and found that the truck ran just fine on this 85-octane gasoline, so that’s what I used from then on when I could find it.

We stopped early for the night in Sheridan, Wyoming, and went for a walk around town after paying for our hotel room and taking a nap. The town boasted a history involving old West characters like Bill Cody, coal mines, and the railroad. We saw a hotel visited by Cody, a steam engine, and an old trolley car that carried folks to the coal mines. The city also had a nice park in the middle with a pasture that supposedly had both buffalo and elk—we saw the buffalo but did not spot the elk. After checking our email at the library and sending a reassuring message to our sons that we were still alive, we bought some groceries and walked back to the hotel room for a relaxing evening.