Day 4
Cody
It's taken me a long time to finish this last day because I have so many pictures to go through, not all of them are posted on this blog!
As I mentioned, we decided to make an early night of it and spend the night in Cody, Wyoming. There is a museum there which has several "sections" to it, and the hubs really wanted to see that. If we would have kept going we would have driven though most of Yellowstone in the dark, so we stayed put and had a nice, relaxing evening, walking down the street and finding an ice cream parlor.
Next morning we headed to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. This contains the gun museum that the hubs wanted to see, so that was the first section we headed to.
To say their gun collection is massive is an understatement. Antiques, early models, prototypes, you name it, they've got it. The first gun you see as you enter is this one. Hard to get a good picture without a reflection.
As you can see, it's a Gatling gun by Colt. Huge. Can't imagine the sound of this one. There are several collections, some grouped by when they were used, (i.e. Revolutionary War, WWI, etc.) Some grouped by manufacturers. I thought that the German models were interesting because of the metal work around the trigger. Artwork in and of itself.
Some of the guns are huge. Hubs doesn't like to have his picture taken, but I wanted him next to this one so you could see the length. Not sure how much kick it would have had, but should I have actually been able to hold it level, I'll bet it still would've knocked me on my butt to fire it. Oh, did I mention it was made for Louis XIII?
The Smithsonian had a travelling exhibit there at the time which had some guns that had been gifted to past US presidents and other guns that had a history of some sort. This one belonged to Andrew Jackson. Again, amazing, painstaking artwork.
There was this interesting sign, telling about Patton wanting the famous Lipizzaner Stallions rescued. I hadn't heard this before.
This is the time clock from the Winchester factory. They have several of the old machines from gun factories as well.
Browning's headquarters are located about 20
miles from me. My sister has been assistant to the CEO there since, well, almost forever. I had to take these pictures for my sister. It's kind of funny travelling to another state to see something that is so local.
More pictures from the gun collection below.
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| Weapons from WWI. My grandfather would have used these. |
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| Another local interest |
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| You can see in the pic below that all of these drawers open up to even more guns. |
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| Ladies day out. The hubs teaches hunter safety and always says girls are naturally better shooters. |
After we finished looking at the gun collection we walked around a bit to see what else was there. We came upon a raptor presentation just as it was finishing up. These birds are beautiful.
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| They would put feathers on strings to hang from the windows to keep birds from flying into them |
There was another section on Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hicock, including information on the travelling Wild West Show.
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| The arena they used in England |
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| Gift from Queen Victoria |
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| Hey, glassies! They used glass balls as targets instead of clay pigeons! |
Of course we visited several different gift shops along the way. Hubby's nickname is Chukar, yep, after the bird. Of course, these HAD to be purchased!
Then onward to Yellowstone.
Yellowstone
I've never been to Yellowstone. I know. Sheltered life. Even with this trip, I've only been in 11 states and one Canadian province. That is one reason why this trip was so fun. Every day was a new discovery, and that was really something I needed! Of course, Yellowstone is gorgeous. We stopped at a couple of places along the road for pictures, drove around the lake, stopped at the visitor's center there, then headed down to Old Faithful. I just HAD to see it erupt. It was a nice, cool day, and it did rain off and on, but nothing that got in our way. Old Faithful teases you... it looks like it's going to erupt, then it settles back down, then pushes up a bit again, well, I kept turning the camera on "just in case" and for the second time on the trip, the batteries ran down on the camera at an inconvenient time. I had extra batteries, but of course, they were in the case, in the car. So... hubby did get the full eruption on his phone video, but for some reason, sending it to me has been problematic. So, I'll end with some beautiful pics of Yellowstone and the video I did get before the camera died. After that, we drove home, collected our dogs from the babysitter, and fell into our own bed. FANTASTIC trip all the way around. So glad we were able to go!! Thanks for joining in!
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| Amazing how a fire leaves a beauty all it's own |
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| At times it felt like driving through a tunnel of trees |
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| Lots of people!! |
