Yellowstone Blanket

Looks like beach blanket kitty bingo..........

May 5 to June 1, 2014 Vermont to Yellowstone and Back

Pictures From the Trip to Yellowstone, Going and Coming back.....

We returned to Brownington on Sunday, June 1, cutting the journey a bit short for a variety of reasons. The Pictures of the Trip came from 3 cameras and now live on a flickr account in an album called Yellowstone 2014. There are few captions at this point, someday we will add them. From May 5 to June 1, we saw the country from Vermont to Wyoming and back. The best part was returning to our little patch and the cats, hearing the peepers in the pond and sleeping in a big bed again.

Oh, Kansas

 Emporia, Kansas, well what can I say. In the outskirts, we found an old jail, and in town, a very nice Mexican restaurant, Casas Ranchos. The campground was the noisiest ever, but the metal birds hanging in the restaurant were spectacular and made in Mexico;  we asked. This location is near the Flint Hills National Wildlife Refuge (where we saw a scissor-tailed flycatcher) and the Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve ( post to follow ).

Heading East....Wyoming to to Kansas

Sinclair

Leaving Wyoming took hours. Vast expanses of sagebrush hills, pronghorns, oil derricks and more sagebrush hills. Along the Platte River again, we made it from Cheyenne, WY to Kearney, NE (again) on I 70, a long hard day to a noisey campground, but we were committed to stay in a hotel the next night  in Manhattan, KS. It was wonderful! Here we had entered the area of the Flint Hills. We had read about this place and the new education center in Manhattan that might help us find a way to experience it.

Grazing on the prairie

South Pass City, gold rush town

 On the way to South Pass, the road across the continental divide at the base of the rockies, we visited an abandoned gold rush town and viewed Red Canyon.  These are just awesome landscapes. The remnants of the old towns were reminiscent of movies we have seen. However, there was a nice Airstream trailer parked on the street in South Pass City! You just never know what you will find when you go down these roads...

abandoned gold mine

Lander and the Oregon Trail

From Lander WY we were able to make a day trip to find the Oregon Trail. Also known as the Mormon Trail, the California Trail and the Pony Express Trail, we could see in the distance (top center) where the wagons had been based on the interpretive signs at the site. We imagined that we were on the actual place where these early travelers had been, but after so many years and so much land use change, we could not be certain.