We said goodbye to Dillon and Fort Caspar campground and rode to breakfast at Hayden’s Place. Our waitress, Sara, was fun to chat with and told us about her hometown in Upper Peninsula, Michigan. A new local, Jacob, sat next to us and we chatted about oil pumps and his mechanic job. He said he’s a recent transplant from Victorville, California. Sara and Jacob debated which was higher population; Cheyenne or Casper. We stayed out of it. As they say “there’s no big cities in Wyoming” and these two were proud of that.
We rode west as planned. The decision we were avoiding was if and where to camp at the midway point between the 95 mile stretch from Casper to Shoshoni. After a lunch of peanut butter and jelly and banana on a tortilla and a nap and lots of water refills, we decided to take advantage of today’s tailwind and ride the whole 95 miles. We also had a gradual downhill since we climbed to 6,400 ft elevation in the first half of the day.
I got overzealous with the tailwind and rode harder than I should have and bonked. In addition, I got my fist flat with only 2 miles to go. Since I wasn’t feeling good, I decided to walk the last 2 miles into town. Steve rode into town to try to book a motel room but they went out of business in this small town of 471 people. Steve found a park and got sandwiches as I recovered from my bonk.
bringing back memories, boys. when you get home got some pages of Hey Mom, from Hell’s Half Acre, Natrona, Powder River, Shoshohi and what used be called Moneta. Kids rode an outhouse there one windy day. Ride on.