Casper, Wyoming - July 4th

July 4, 2011 – Casper, Wyoming

I don’t know if I mentioned it before or not, but Sylvia is not real fond of driving (or riding in the passenger seat) on narrow winding mountain roads. When the road cliff edge is on the passenger side of the motorcoach, she has a tendency to lean toward the driver’s side, and keeps accusing me of trying to get as close to the right side of the road as I can get, just to frighten her. That is not true but the coach is wider than a car, so she really is closer to the edge of the road. She is also much higher from the road surface than when in a car, so I guess it makes her ‘center of gravity’ feel less stable. The trip out of Estes Park, CO was another ‘white knuckle trip’ for her, but unfortunately there is not much alternative once you are up in the mountains, but to come back down again….

I searched through all of our pictures for an image of us coming down a mountain road, to show how close we actually get to the side of the road, but I couldn’t find a single image.  I soon realized why.  When coming down the mountain roads, both my hands are on the steering wheel and I am concentrating on keeping the motorcoach between the lines on the road. Meanwhile, both of Sylvia’s hands are gripped tightly onto the armrests with the white knuckles, so she isn’t thinking about taking any pictures either. 

Sorry about that.

Once we got down to flatter land north of Denver and into Wyoming, the white knuckles went away and the death grip on the armrests subsided.  Southeastern Wyoming is lots of open space, rolling hills and oil wells pumping everywhere.

There were also swollen rivers.  Our RV Park was called Rivers Edge RV Resort, and is on the banks of the North Platte River. The Platte River was about 4-5 feet higher than normal.  Nothing dangerous, just a lot more water than normal.

We found out that there was a scheduled ‘simulcast’ fireworks display in Casper for the 4^th, so we put the top down, found a parking spot among the whole population of Casper and then some, tuned the radio to the simulcast station and waited for the fireworks display to begin. They really did it well, and it was pretty nice sitting under the stars listening to the rousing patriotic music and marches, with the fireworks exploding above us.

I took a lot more pictures of the fireworks, but enough is enough, and you’ve seen your own displays. After all, fireworks are fireworks. Sorry I can’t play the simulcast on the blog for you because it was impressive, but I don’t think that is possible.

In Wyoming, you don’t want to miss the Interstate exit you should be getting off at, because the next exit is likely 20 or 30 miles away for you to turn around. Voice of experience speaking, but in my case after the fireworks, on the way back to the RV Park,  we were tooling along with the top down enjoying the great weather and all the millions of stars in the Wyoming sky, and when I came to our exit for some reason I thought there would be an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ exit. After I passed it, I realized there was no second exit….  I figured no problem, just go to the next exit. It was then that the GPS announced that the next exit was 17 miles away, so my lapse in attention cost us almost a half hour and 34 extra miles of premium gas (4.04/gal last fillup).. I must admit that it was an enjoyable mistake, keeping the top down, driving just above the 75 MPH speed limit with the radio blasting, the wind blowing our hair everywhere, and reveling in the moment.

To show you how much influence oil drilling has had on the history of Casper and Wyoming, here is a statue of oil well workers that we would not have seen if we had not missed our exit.

Happy Fourth of July..