Let’s Try This Again
South Dakota and Wyoming
Our 2020 road trip was supposed to take us to the Canyonlands Needles District in Southern Utah. We didn’t get to go in 2020, so it was high on our list to try again in 2021. Somehow, I managed to reserved the exact same campsite that had been cancelled the year before, next to our very own rock formation for two nights! I think all of us were super excited to get back to Utah again!
Day One
Monday, June 7, 2021
According to my notes, our drive across the state began at 2:30pm. Who knows what I was doing until then! The world was still recovering from the after-effects of the covid pandemic, so I know I prepped a lot of food for the meals we took along. I like to have all of the cheese sliced or grated, the onions sautéed, the meat browned, the bars I baked, individually wrapped…and all of it bagged up and frozen. Even the potatoes for a dutch oven omelette were sliced and diced in advance.
Not that I did any of that the day we left, but adding that to the prep work of going camping, pushes everything else to the end of the list. I’m sure I didn’t start on that to-do list nearly early enough, but there’s always one more thing to do, and one more thing to do before a camping trip. Thankfully, we gain an hour along the way when we head west!
Since we got a late start, we opted to grab our favorite Culvers kids’ meals in Rapid City, rather than cook the dutch oven omelette I had planned for the first night. That ended up being a great plan because we saw giant lightning in the west while we were stopped for gas outside of Sundance, Wyoming. I don’t know how many times running behind has actually saved us from arriving at, or being in a campground during a thunderstorm.
The best thing to come out of our Plan B road trip to the Bighorns in 2020 was the knowledge that we could camp somewhere other than the Black Hills or Devils Tower on our first night. After eight hours on the road, two gas stops, and a Culvers stop, we made it to South Fork Campground for the night. We fell asleep to the sound of a creek we could not see in the dark.
Day Two
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
South Fork Campground, Bighorn National Forest
I rather enjoy the surprise we get in the morning when we arrive after dark the night before. We had placed our tent with the door facing the creek, so the first view after opening the zipper was all trees with the creek below. I would imagine most folks would love to stay and enjoy a campsite like this for days, but we needed to be in Dubois, Wyoming by noon, and we wanted to stop in Thermopolis along the way. We were up with the chirping birdies at 6am and on the road by 7am.
Thermopolis, Wyoming
Hot Springs State Park in Thermopolis, Wyoming is such a weird place. The landscape looks like a root beer float ran over the side of a glass. Unfortunately, it does not smell like a root beer float! The park claims to be the home of the world’s largest mineral hot springs, and there’s even a bath house where you can go to enjoy a soak in the hot water. We did not do that, but it was interesting to take a walk around on the boardwalk to see the thermal features up close.
The smell of sulphur was plenty strong, so I’m not sure what makes anyone want to soak in water that smells like that. Maybe we don’t know what we’re missing? We needed to keep moving, though, so there was no time for soaking in stinky water anyway. It was well worth stopping to take a look at it, though.
A Strange Encounter
We stopped for gas in the tiny town of Crowheart, Wyoming. I was minding my own business, washing the windows while pumping the gas, when a random stranger came up to me. She pointed to our South Dakota plates and then felt the need to tell me that she loved our governor. At the time, it seemed like such a strange thing to say to someone you don’t know, while getting gas in the middle of nowhere. This was not the last encounter like this on this road trip.
I pulled out our lunch to eat along the way and we were back on the road to Dubois, Wyoming. Megan had a Zoom meeting for one of her scholarships at noon and I had very cleverly planned for her to do that while Joey and I visited the National Museum of Military Vehicles. She was not interested in tanks and we would have plenty of them to look at while she did her thing. It was a win-win for all of us!
I had called them in advance to ask if it would be possible for her to use their wifi while we visited and they said it would be no problem. The person gave me their name and said to let them know at the desk that it was approved when we got there. They had lots of seating all over their entry area, so she was able to find a quiet spot to set up camp while we toured the exhibit halls.
National Museum of Military Vehicles
The National Museum of Military Vehicles houses a collection of around 500 restored military vehicles. It opened in August of 2020, with all types of military vehicles arranged by the different eras of military history. Everything was laid out really well and they included a lot of imagery and interpretive information to go with the displays. I had a lot of fun photographing everything from the small details to the vehicles themselves, so there are a ton of photos to share! Where there are photo galleries, be sure to tap on a photo to enlarge them.
The scenes above that have snow on the ground, also had snow flying through the air projected on the wall behind the vehicles.
Scenes like the one above almost look AI generated because of how the mannequins look with everything blending together under the lighting. I did not apply any filters to create this look; it’s exactly how this scene appears in the museum. They really did a nice job of creating all of the different scenes.
This scene featured a tank with bombers flying overhead. We had to stand there for a few minutes waiting for the next one to fly over, and that took a few times to get a photo of it. The sound of the planes really made you feel like you were there on the ground.
Helicopters were flying on the wall next to the helicopter on display. You could hear the helicopter pilots talking on the radios, along with the other helicopters flying. It was a very immersive experience with the planes flying overhead and the helicopters in motion.
As you walked through the dark jungles of the Vietnam era, there were buttons to push and light up different things to see and learn about. They really went to a lot of effort to create the different scenes and showcase the unique parts of the different places in military history.
This is not your average military museum with a bunch of vehicles lined up in a row. It also doesn’t smell like other military museums I’ve visited. I will say that I am not someone who is interested in military history at all, but I found this museum to be fascinating! Joey has always been a military airplane buff, but he wanted to see some tanks this time, and I think he enjoyed it quite a lot, as well.
We were there for three hours and were able to see everything inside and outside, but I suspect one could spend a lot more time reading each placard. Joey and I went through fairly quickly to make sure we could see everything before Megan was done with her meeting, and then with the time we had left, we went back around to read more of the information in the different areas we wanted to experience again. I paid $15 per person in 2021, which seemed expensive before going inside, but I was convinced that it was well worth the price by the time we were done.
That being said, their current 2024 price is $23 and veterans are $18. Active duty military and kids under 10 are free. The price of admission allows for entry on two consecutive days. Personally, I don’t like to pay for two days’ worth of admission if I’m only able to be there on one day. Everyone would have to want to read a lot of signs to make it take two days. While it was well worth the $15 per person we paid, I would hesitate to pay $23 per person to go again. I realize this is the price range of a lot of newer museums these days, but when I can pay $80 to enter as many national parks as we can visit over the course of a year, versus the $69 it would take for three of us to revisit one museum for a couple of hours, it’s really difficult to justify paying that much. I’m really glad Joey and I were able to see it for $30 while Megan was able to use that time to attend her meeting.
When Megan texted us to say that she was done, Joey did a little shopping in the gift shop for a new shirt and then we went outside to the pavilion where they house the vehicles that have not yet been restored. We did not spend a lot of time in the pavilion because we needed to get back on the road again! We drove through the town of Dubois, which was a really cute little western town, and then on to Grand Teton National Park.
It was almost 5pm when we arrived at the entrance sign to the Grand Tetons and then we had another twenty minutes to drive to Signal Mountain Campground, where we had a reservation to camp that night. I had hoped to be there a little earlier for a hike, but we were ready to get to our campsite. We’d have time to look around more in the morning.
We set up the tent and then got to work on cooking a dutch oven omelette. I do not know what possessed me to mess with charcoal and fire, as well as toting along a cast iron dutch oven and lid lifter for one meal, but it was a tasty meal! The recipe is linked below!
After we dumped water on the coals and made sure they were out, we went down to the shower house for showers. The attendant was cleaning them, so most of them had been locked up for the night and we had to wait to get into the ones that were still open. I’m not sure why their showers have “business hours” when other places let you shower anytime, but at least we were able to shower after sitting in the campfire smoke!
After we had all showered, we headed back to our tent to get some sleep. It had been a busy day and we had another a big day ahead of us!
Subscribe to find out where we’re off to next on this adventure!