DAY 6 brings us "home"

Wednesday night we stayed at the Townhouse Motel in Lusk, WY, which is just a few miles from the Nebraska line. We've stayed there many times on previous trips and really like it. We are always in one of two rooms: #9 or #10. This time it was #9. We had fresh air, one of the reasons we like it - you can open windows. And breakfast! It comes with the room, but to get it, you go down the street to the Best Western Motel, and they have a full hot breakfast inside, and custom-made omelettes outside! You can choose either or have both. I had a combination: an omelette made from my chosen ingrediants, plus home fries, bacon, biscuit, and decaf from inside.

My omelette in the making.

The Best Western outdoor breakfast area. *********************** We ate outside. It was pretty breezy, and we were in the shade, but it felt very safe to eat outside, COVID-wise. On pretty much this entire trip, we have seen few people wearing masks; a few, to be sure, but I would estimate that 90% of people in the middle west and west are not wearing masks in public. This is very different from Vermont. After breakfast. we returned our key to the motel, mailed cards at the Lusk P.O., and took off for the trip to Alpine, which takes us across the entire state of Wyoming, east to west. Lusk is on the Nebraska border, Alpine is on the Idaho border. However, I was preparing to read aloud and wasn't paying attention to how we left Lusk, and Ellen went straight where we should have turned right, and headed south instead of west. At a certain point I looked out the window and saw a sign for a town I didn't recognize. "Where are we?" I said. A quick check on the map (we carry a road atlas in addition to using the iphone as a GPS) showed we were on the wrong road. We were headed for Cheyenne, not Casper. But it also showed that we were very close to Fort Laramie National Historic Site. We had visited Fort Niobrara N.H.S. yesterday, why not Fort Laramie N.H.S. today? If we hadn't taken the wrong road, we wouldn't even have known about it. So we took it as a "blessing in disguise." If nothing else, they may have post cards. Ellen is always on the lookout for post cards! So we went to Fort Laramie, and that will be the subject of a separate blog post (q.v.). It was very interesting, and they did have post cards!

The Cavalry Barracks at Fort Laramie. ************************************ (I am going to insert here an excerpt from an article by National Park Service historian, Richard Sellars, who is critical of the way the NPS has ignored native history integrally related to the Fort. In 1987, roughly 14 years after AIM’s initial threat, the park completed its last, and one of its most ambitious, restoration efforts, affecting about half of the two-story, 273-foot-long enlisted men’s cavalry barracks. Of the half-dozen or more army buildings restored by the Park Service, it is this structure that most symbolizes the military’s final, determined drive to subdue the Indians—in current lingo, its “shock and awe” against Northern Plains tribes. The army had built the barracks in 1873-1874 to accommodate a hundred or more additional cavalrymen, thereby strengthening its mounted forces to strike the enemy: those Indians who refused to accept confinement on their reservation or abandonment of traditional hunting areas. But what one sees today in the barracks is mainly where the soldiers ate and slept. The ultimate purpose of the 1870s cavalry barracks—to house reinforcements for the final suppression of Northern Plains Indians to make way for white occupation—is only implied. Overall, the messages conveyed by Fort Laramie’s restored buildings, and most notably at the cavalry barracks, reveal no substantive connection with consequences of the army’s military actions on the plains. It is a mystery to me why daily army life should be presented as the primary aspect of the site’s history, and it suggests the need for the Park Service to print the disturbing facts as much if not more than it prints the romantic legend. Otherwise, where and how does the Indian story fit in? They suffered the worst consequences. And without their presence, the military would have had little need to build forts on the Northern Plains. When we left Fort Laramie, we got ourselves back on course by getting on I-25 north to Casper, and from there, to Shoshoni. A good part of that drive, either I read aloud, or we listened to a "Teaching Company" lecture. I am reading from Wallace Stegner's The Big Rock Candy Mountain. It is quite compelling, and for a book written at least 75 years ago or more, amazingly touches on issues that are still convulsing our society today. The lectures are by Bart Ehrman, from UNC, and are on "The Historical Jesus." For me, they recapitulate much of what I learned in my graduate work 60 years ago, and it is reassuring in a way that most of what he says in recently created lectures is familiar to me. But I pick up some new ideas, and Ellen finds them quite interesting. It is true, however, that his bibliography in the accompanying handbook lists books mostly unknown to me. So I have some catching up to do if I want to lead a Bible Study group at Guilford Church this fall. ********************************* The iphone GPS showed a route from Shoshoni to Dubois we had never noticed before. GPS's have a knack for finding "the fastest route" which takes you on roads you never knew even existed. This can get you into a lot of trouble - which is what heppened to us in suburban Chicago on Sunday. But today, it looked worth exploring. And indeed, it was a lovely state highway that cuts off a dip the usual route takes south to Riverton and then back up north again, and not only saved probably 15-20 minutes of driving time but took us through agricultural lands we hadn't seen before and by a lake - Ocean Lake - we had never seen either. That time-saving compensated a bit for what we lost when we took the wrong road out of Lusk. Today's trip did take us through a lot of construction - that has been true for pretty much the entire trip. Our tax dollars are really at work this summer! So we had to deal with red traffic lights making us wait forever when there was nobody coming the other way, and then finally the line of oncoming traffic led by a "Pilot Car - Follow Me" pickup truck. When we got to Dubois, we saw a cone advertising ice cream, and pulled into a little square behind the shops lining the highway. We never found the ice cream, but there was an Ace Hardware where I looked for new rubber tips for my walking poles (no luck), and a restaurant, 2 Z's BBQ, a log cabin structure perched on the bank of the Wind River, which looked interesting. We opted for BBQ and had ribs, beans, corn bread and Mac & Cheese, reasonably priced and way more food than we could manage to eat, eaten outside accompanied by the music of the rushing stream virtually at our feet. From Dubois, we went over the Togwotee Pass (pronounced TOH-guh-tee - a high mountain pass at an elevation of 9,655 feet above sea level), and then the long descent down to Teton National Park with fabulous views, and on into Jackson Hole, WY.

Waiting at what had been an interminable red light.

Now it's our turn! Following the Pilot Car.

2-Z's BBQ (we speculated that the owners might be "Zach" and "Zara" - "Z" names familiar to us back home.

A beautiful row of hollyhocks near the BBQ place.

Dramatic and colorful geology!

Tetons in the distance - looking like clouds, not mountains!

The Teton mountains for sure. ******************************* By the time we reached Jackson, it was about 7:30p.m., and we called Paul to let him know where we were. We wanted to get ice cream at Moo's - possibly the best ice cream in the world, but Jackson was awash in tourists, it was a "zoo," there were no parking places, and when we drove by Moo's, the line of people waiting to get their cones went quite a ways down the street. So we gave up on that idea. We drove by a huge new housing development in downtown Jackson that had sprung up since our last visit in June, 2021. How do these things get built so quickly when there is presumably a worker shortage and a supply-chain problem caused by COVID? Somebody with a lot of money must be pulling some strings that Paul can't pull, and thus he has to constantly deal with delays in his construction work. Nothing about Jackson today gives you the desire to live there. Ellen commented that when she lived there c. 25 years ago, it was ideal and she probably got out at just the right time. The road down to Hoback Jct. had been widened after years of being under construction, but it is still a work in progress, and going down the canyon to Alpine, we had to deal with those orange traffic guides lined up down the center of the road in lieu of a painted center line that in the twiight and with oncoming headlights, were almost impossible to see. We managed to make it to Alpine without bopping one accidently. And when we arrived at Paul and Jenny's, we were met with many hugs, especially from a taller Max, who is entering high school in just a few days, and also met by much barking from Rollie, their dog. Good to be "home."