Day 4: 18 Days...Really?!

I think it just hit me that we are taking more than a typical vacation.  I'd been so involved in the planning that I think the magnitude of the trip kind of got lost along the way.  It's been a lot of driving up to this point (we're on the road from Devil's Tower on our way to Cody right now).  The kids have been good...the iPads have helped.  We make them put them away for some parts of the trip but to be honest it's been a nice diversion for them on these longer stretches.

Let me tell you about the day so far:

My little Max sure likes to make friends; he says "hi" to just about everyone.  I had him in the shower this morning and the two ladies in the showers next to us were trying to talk to each other and he kept answering.  Super funny to me; not sure if they heard him but they didn't seem to be in a good mood to be entertained by such things.  Conversation went like this:  Woman 1: "Are you done with the shampoo?"  Max:  "Yes! I'm just washing my body."  Followed by giggles by him.  He kept going on and on for everything they were saying.  Such a happy buddy in the morning.

We left camp at 9am (keeping to the itinerary...just sayin'...) and headed west to Devil's Tower.  Pretty drive up this way; Tom nor I have been this way before.  Needed to repack bags of clothes for the next few days.  You can mock my organizational tendencies, but those bags are working out nicely.  Since Mom is in the camper with the kids, she can just grab the bag of clothes for the day and get them dressed even if I'm not in here.  If you think, "just have a pile of clothes to grab" then good for you, I need a little more planning though and didn't want a pile of clothes just sitting around and not be able to find anything.  But I digress...

Seeing Devils Tower in the distance was neat; I'm glad we made the little detour north to check it out.  I had planned on going right into the monument and letting the kids run around but there was a line at the ranger station to get in so we just pulled into the little Outpost outside of the park for some ice cream and a little shopping.  Sophie picked out a prairie dog and I let her get it - she was so excited about the yipping prairie dogs yesterday that I figured it was a good souvenir for her.  It's neat to get her souvenirs because they really do remind her of her trips.  She still talks about her manatee snow globe from Sea World and remembers the trip.  It would have been neat to see the tower up close but even if we went in I don't think we would have taken the time to hike up close to it anyway.  

So now we are on the road to Cody where we plan on catching the rodeo tonight.  Still not sure what we are going to do for transportation to the rodeo; thinking we may just take the RV right to the rodeo and then head back to the site after.  That might actually be the easiest plan.  So, today's plan was:

Devils Tower

Cody Rodeo

Buffalo Bill State Park

What an awesome trip!  Oh, and we just saw a mule deer running alongside the road.  This is really, really cool.  Definitely digging the motorhome for our travels.