Thanksgiving Weekend

With the Thanksgiving public holiday on Thursday we were able to add Friday and have a four day weekend to go exploring. We decided to go over the Big horn Mountains to Cody on the edge of Yellowstone National Park and then come back across a different route over the Big Horns.
It was a great trip, the only downside was that there wasn't quite enough snow to be able to hire snow mobiles. There were plenty of people riding there own but the lodges weren't hiring yet. It's snowing today and more is expected this week so it wont be long until we will be able to give it a go.

The first place we stayed was called Bear Lodge and it is in the northern part of the Big Horns at a place called Burgess Junction. Very friendly place with a great atmosphere, looks like it would really go off on New Years eve.




After spending Thursday night there we headed east to Cody, a town built by 'Buffalo Bill' Cody.

On the road between Burgess Junction and Cody we came across an interesting little store, I had to take a photo for you Annie.




We stayed in a B&B there that had been converted from an old church. Buffalo Bill built the Irma Hotel in Cody, named after his daughter and in it is an old Redwood Bar that is evidently the most photographed thing in Cody. Gae and I had lunch there, they have some interesting stuff on the menu. I couldn't bring myself to try the oysters.
Cody also has the Buffalo Bill museum which is a great place to visit. There are 5 sections to it, one is all about Buffalo Bill, another about the history of the indians, a third is a natural history museum, forth is an art gallery and the fifth is a history of guns in the US. It's the largest collection of US made guns in the world, there are about 3000 of them.






They also have a real desire to shoot things and stick their heads on a wall over here. We took some photos of a few examples.






After leaving Cody we drove to a town called Ten Sleeps on the southern end of the Big Horns and stayed in a place called Meadowlark Lake Resort. Very pretty place to stay but would find it hard to rate much above 1/2 a star. The rooms were pretty basic but the staff were friendly and we ended up having a pretty good time in the bar.
Meadowlark lake is frozen now and we walked out on it to take a few photo's. You can see the ski runs in the background across the lake. One of the young guys that works at the place took us four wheel driving in his "monster truck", a tricked up F350 and that was pretty good.