whilst in torrington, we also made two wyoming based field trips. we were a little over an hour from cheyenne, so i figured we could kill a day by driving out to the capitol building. this was before i realized we would pass through cheyenne on our next travel day. oops.
anyhow. we made the long and very boring drive to the capital of wyoming. of course we had to take a photo with the buffalo statue. we also met some other folks from north carolina while we were there. always fun.
cheyenne also turned out to be the first real civilized area we had been in since an overnight in billings, just after glacier, so we took the opportunity to visit target before our long drive home.
much nearer to our campground was fort laramie national historic site. it turned out to be much cooler than we anticipated. we took the self guided tour, checking out all of the remaining buildings, and chatting with several rangers who were dressed in fort laramie era garb. and obviously, anything linked to the oregon trail peaks our interest, mine because of my elementary school years playing the game on the computers in my classrooms, and the kids who are now playing the reboot app on their ipads.
the lidkids all scored another ranger badge (they were really racking them up this trip). we were all pleasantly surprised with how much we enjoyed this little park. and that was before….
…before we happened upon the soldiers tavern! they were serving ice cold bottled root beers and cream sodas, so of course we ordered a round, and acted like we were in an old timey saloon.
this for sure was their favorite part of the day.
we squeezed a lot into our time in torrington, wyoming, but we were sure to keep all of our activities to the morning, because in the afternoon, we swam… (stay tuned).