7-26, Fort Laramie, WY

One of my favorite stops and memory makers from this trip was our spontaneous jaunt off I-25 to Fort Laramie.  It was getting late in the day, the sun was getting low, we weren't sure where to stop for dinner or the night (not too bad of a problem when you carry your little house around with you).  We headed further east beyond the Oregon Trail Ruts until we arrived at historic Fort Laramie.  When we arrived one hour before closing, we realized there was too much to see within that limited amount of time.  But the sky, the sky!  I also realized that if we did the practical thing of finding a camping site for the night and came back in the morning that I would lose that fabulous cloudy sky for my photos.  We stuffed Nik full of turkey bites (the always hungry teenager that he now is who would have preferred dinner to a tour) and set off.  Beings as it was the end of the day, there weren't too many visitors still there and we almost had the place to ourselves.  This memory of Nik with his bag of turkey bites, Em with her stuffed James (how funny that she calls her stuffed wolf 'James'?!  Lol....), me running from ruins to ruins completely shutter happy, while Sven was on the look out for snakes, is one of those memories that I will always cherish.  We were a family, we were all engaged in the same activity (no easy task with the age range of our kids!), we were all enjoying the moment, and we were all learning some history.  It was extra special knowing that this was one of the few moments of this vacation that we would get to share with Nik.  It was a perfect, happy memory.  We could have turned around and gone home the next day and I would have felt this vacation had been a success!

Hospital Ruins

Hospital Ruins

Mess Hall in the Cavalry Barracks

Sleeping Quarters in the Cavalry Barracks

Sleeping Quarters in Cavalry Barracks

a mirage of past and present

Colonel's Quarters

Officers' Quarters Ruins

Officers' Quarters Ruins alongside Bachelor Officers' Quarters ("Old Bedlam" is Wyoming's oldest documented building)

Captain's Quarters

Administration Building Ruins

Infantry Barracks Foundation Ruins

Looking Across the Laramie River

Em and James in a teepee 

7-26, Oregon Trail Ruts

My discombobulated mind is going to attempt to retrace our steps of our recent vacation to Montana. I have found that since being whacked on the head (going on over a month now) I struggle to remember things properly and the words that I do use do not have the fluency they once did.  Surely, hopefully, this is all part of the recovery, but I did want to warn you in case you notice that my posts don't have the same flair.  If my commentary is lacking, then I at least hope you enjoy the images and the tour itself.  What felt like a 'really long errand' by taking Nik to summer camp in Bozeman turned out to be a really great family vacation.  The best part of the trip is that the only detail planned was having Nik in Bozeman at 10 am on August 1 for the camp.  Everything else was spontaneous.  (Dang, it felt good to see how the other half live!  And, just wait to see how we carried out the spontaneity all the way through to the very end of the trip!)

Let's begin with stop #1:  the Oregon Trail Ruts in Wyoming near Guernsey.  Instead of me recounting the history of this stop, just double click on the picture of the sign so you can read all about it.  What I had envisioned of the ruts was something entirely different.  It was pretty hard to imagine a train of wagons cutting through the sandy ground and leaving these 4 foot ruts that have stood the test of time a century and a half later.  What journeys these people must have been on!