18 September

Cody WY – Gillette WY

Museums are one of our favourite things when travelling. Many are must-see and well known – like the Louvre! - others, like Trail Town in Cody WY, are probably locally revered but not on the same plane as many of the grand museums of Europe. It all depends on what you are looking for. In 1969, Paul Newman and Robert Redford starred in one of our favourite movies, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. We've lost count but we must have seen it more than 50 times? So you can imagine how enthralled we were with a museum that featured buildings that our 'heroes' actually lived in or visited.

Sited on the outskirts of the old cattle town of Cody, a small village of original buildings from the late 19^th century has been gathered in a street that could be right out of the 1880s. The Mud Spring Cabin where Sundance and Kid Currey (Butch's predecessor) planned their raids was balanced on the other side of the street by the Hole in the Wall cabin where Butch, Sundance and others hid out between robberies. Fantastic! AND..complete with wild rabbits bounding about amongst the ruins.

The more well-known Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody was large, well laid out and full of authentic western memorabilia focused on the life and times of the bigger than BIG hero of the Old West – Buffalo Bill Cody. Interesting but, for us, not a patch on the far less pretentious Trail Town.

The drive from Cody down the eastern slopes of the Rockies was a mix of hundreds of kms of rolling grazing land and spectacular rocky canyons.

17 September

Cody Wyoming

Cody is about as close as we have managed to get to the Old West. Buffalo Bill (Cody) is associated with this town. Yet it's hard to get the same frontier feeling one gets in towns in Western Queensland. The town's facade is all too new and well maintained to be a real western town. It all comes close though. Our motel is called the 'Big Bear'. It has all the normal trappings in the room, but the outside is comfortingly rural - dirt fore-court, rabbits bounding through the rough dry grass behind the units and the owner's kid wandering about on her pony. There is even a corral for visiting horses out the front!

Most of today we worked our way around the Yellowstone Grand Canyon. Between us, we must have taken a hundred photos. It was the sort of place where we finally had to call a halt and declare, 'not one more photo!'.

Yesterday we only saw individual bison. Today we saw whole herds out on the meadows between the mountains. A truly majestic sight!