Off To Thermopolis!

The Spy Twins, Mr. Bechtel and I just got back from an amazing 4 days at a Buck Brannaman horse riding clinic in Thermopolis Wyoming.  We only went to watch, but it was still incredible!  Braeburn was down working in Provo, and Golden Delicious and Granny Smith agreed to stay and do all the chores for us. 

Palisades Lake was beautiful as we drove by on our way. 

And the Tetons were just as beautiful as I remember.  Such amazing, amazing mountains!

We were on budget rations so we decided to camp.  We stayed at this place two years ago when we went to Mount Rushmore and it was so memorable (not completely good) that we decided we'd better try it again.  The boys stayed in a tent and Mr. Bechtel and I stayed in the back of the suburban.

The Camp ground (rv park) has a mineral pool to swim in so each night after the clinic we'd go swimming, and the pool still had the inch of strange sediment at the bottom that I remembered from last time.  The first time we stayed a man came and serenaded us on his guitar each night.  He was pretty good.  (he also was a registered preacher and would conduct baptisms at the pool on sunday).  This time he was gone for the week and so a different a guy came out to sing for us.  Unfortunately, he was not so good.

  He would come out and sing the same 7 songs on his guitar.  Exactly the same songs, in the same order, each night.    Most memorable was his rendition of..."old dogs and children and watermelon wine."  Every night he also sang a song he'd written himself..."and I"ll never move horses with Willy again."  And each night he would introduce each song in exactly the same way.

By the last night we were begging Prairie Spy to go sing us a song at the mic. "Well, folks, this is open mic, so If you've got a song you'd like to sing, c'mon up!"  We tried to cajole, plead, and force Prairie  to go but he was not going to sing for an audience, so in the end we just ended up listening to more of his songs, which ended with him doing Tim McGraw's "Why do you have to be angry all the time."

When we had all the culture we could handle, we would round up our quarters because you could have a shower for 2 1/2 minutes for 25 cents.

Then we went back to our own campfire and sang Marty Robbins songs, and sounded much better, if I do say so myself, and went to sleep early thinking about what amazing things we were going to see Buck do the next day.