Day 19 (July 7th) – Buffalo, Wyoming to Cheyenne, Wyoming

There’s a brewing storm a coming.
I’ll just state right off the top that this day is a little less exciting than the last couple of days. You could say it is boring in comparison. We woke to a nice sunny day and hoped that we have seen the last of the bad weather, but we are always hoping for this, so I guess we should start praying. Last night was a different story. The wind blew kind of hard and it awoke me, so I started to stay alert because I didn’t know if we were in for a repeat performance of the earlier storm. Nothing materialized so I just loss some valuable sleep.

As I said, the day started out sunny as we headed northwest on I-90. Our destination was the Little Bighorn National Battlefield, which is better known as Custer’s Last Stand. I was there about thirty years ago, so I was interested in seeing if things changed like at Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse. You know this is beginning to sound like a thirty year reunion tour. I didn’t plan it that way, but I am visiting many sights that I saw when my parents dragged me across America on one of the summer trips.

As we started up the road to the battlefield, Miles noticed that it was a National Monument, so naturally he goes awesome another Junior Ranger badge. We went through the visitor center and watched the film on the battle that took place and about the battlefield. After watching the film, we walked up Last Stand Hill. This is where Custer died along with the rest of his men under his direct command. The headstones mark the location where the soldiers died.

A new addition to the battlefield is the inclusion of headstones of the Indians that died. They also added a monument to the Indians that fought in the battle. The monument has the known names of the Indians that died during the battle. One interesting name of the Indians that died was Plenty Lice. I’m not kidding. It is engraved in marble on the monument.

The kids did get their Junior Ranger badge, which makes this badge number five on this trip. Miles is so happy about his badges. He wears them on his shirt. Samantha doesn’t want to be out done by her brother so she has put them on her cap.

The rest of the day was spent driving from the battlefield, which is in Montana to Cheyenne, Wyoming. This was a very long distance. It reminded me of the trips with my family. My dad used to always say that we had to go 500 miles a day. This made for some very long days in the back of a car squished between my siblings. We would always plead and beg to stop every time we saw a really good campground. It almost never worked. My dad used to tell us that we need to get to such and such town so that we could see everything. I now know what he meant. As a kid, you are on summer vacation and it lasts months, so taking extra day is no big deal, but when you are working, you have to fit everything in the time allotted.

It has been a really long two plus weeks and everyone is starting to get a little road weary. Samantha came down with it first. She came down with it even before we left. As the trip got closer, she would be more and more vocal about how unhappy she is about being on the road for three weeks. Lisa started to get weary as soon as she ran out of her favorite mocha drink, which was last week. Miles started up about the same time as Lisa or a little after her. It hit me today on the long drive to Cheyenne. We have only a few days left so hopefully some fun stuff will make it easier. We all want to sleep in our beds and take showers in our own home.

Like yesterday, the late afternoon saw the skies turn from sun to a dark dark gray, so much so that the car thought it was dusk and turned on the headlights. To get to Cheyenne we had to drive right through a squaw line. After yesterdays little storm, none of use was looking forward to driving through it or having to unhook the trailers in Cheyenne in the middle of a storm. The rain came down in big fat drops, it down poured and even a nice easy rain came down at times. The wind didn’t seem as bad as yesterday. As we got just outside of Cheyenne, the clouds broke and the sun was shining down on us. The campground that we stayed at was soaked and muddy, so we missed the rain in Cheyenne, which made me very happy.

We drove a total of 509 miles to day. We have driven a total of 5828 miles for the entire trip. We spent $97 on the purchase of gas today.