WELCOME TO THERMOPOLIS - HOME OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST MINERAL HOT SPRINGS

July 16 & 17, 2013

Thermopolis is Greek for "Hot City."  Interesting fact: This is the home town of the governor.  (We listened to the park's information radio station to find out that nugget.)

 Hot Springs State Park is located in Thermopolis. It is free and beautiful.   The park has two swimming pools with slides and a free soaking pool.  There is also a swinging footbridge and a walking tour of pools of mineral waters flowing into the river below.

 The swinging bridge was build in 1910.  I think there was a hotel on one side and it is how guests got to the pools.

The boardwalk was interesting.  The only thing we were missing was water to drink.  

It was hot and humid. 

View from the river.  This park is peaceful.  There   are picnic areas, walkways along the Wind River and lots of grass.  The pools were not over packed and families were enjoying strolling and looking at all the features.








Thermopoplis also is known for dinosaurs and fossils.  Wyoming Dinosaur Center is located here.  We're not into dinosaurs, so passed on visiting the center. I did think of my friends Josh, Isaac,  Ben, Alexis, Haley, Nathan, Clark, and Jack and how excited they would be to see dinosaur bones.

Free soaking pool - you can soak for 20 minutes in the park soaking pool.  This is where I'll be today.

The park continues up the hill to Joe Sneider Point.  Evidently, Joe and friends saw the steam from the pools in the distrance and thought it was an angry Indian tribe getting ready for battle.  They went to this point to scout out the situation.  I bet they were surprised to see the pools of water instead of the Native Americans.

New wildflowers. 

 We saw bison, pronghorn and this gentle deer today.  My first sighting of pronghorn was in the front yard of a farm house along the highway.  At first I thought they were goats just like I saw at my cousin's Carrol's house - nope pronghorn.

We also saw small oil and natural gas wells on farm land.  Ray said "Where there are dinosaurs, there is oil."  Wonder if that's true?

EAGLE RV PARK

We're staying at Eagle RV Park. 

 This is a great little park.  It has everything we need:  Full hook-up, cable, wifi, showers, laundry, and AC.   Everything a continuous traveler needs after two days without modern conveniences.  It running us about $35 per night with Good Sam and cash discount.

There are grassy areas but the space assigned to us is all gravel.  This is fine - we pulled out our rug and made due.   The weather is muggy and so we are spending time inside with AC on.  Didn't think we would have muggy weather in Wyoming.


Best news - there is an Ace Hardware up the road.  Ray is so happy.  We lost our welcome mat somewhere between Cody and Greybull (home of firefighter airplane museum that you can see at the rest stop just west of town.)

Last night, every RV was from a different state.  Interesting.

Sydney and Louie like the dog walk.  However both prefer grass over gravel and were thrill with the walk in the state park yesterday afternoon.

WYOMING CAMPING PLANS

Our plan for Wyoming is to camp mostly in state parks and then intermingle with private campgrounds for showers, internet access, laundry, and air conditioning.  Not too worried about which direction we go for the next couple of weeks. 

Ray does have a rule about avoiding highways with high high mountain passes.  Also, boondocking might be out of the question.  Just outside Yellowstone there was a sign saying camping only in designated parks because of bears.  There are several FS campgrounds near the park to stay so no worries.  Evidently, there is a housing shortage in some WY cities and campground reviews have focused on larger than normal amount of full-time residence in RV parks - so we decided not to go to Casper and instead focus on smaller towns and FS/state/county campgrounds.  I think we are going to keep north and head into South Dakota just ahead of bikers going to Sturgis.