Cody Wyoming Vacation Day 1

Our cabin in Cody, Wyoming was nothing special, but the views were fabulous. There was hiking right outside the front door. We were all excited to explore the area, with the bear spray of course. Robb and Bryce were the most adventurous. They hiked to the highest place they could. Caleb isn't a hiker and he stuck around the cabin looking at things. The girls and I "hiked" a bit, but we tended to go horizontal and not vertical. Emmy did decide that she wanted to hike up, so Bryce and Robb helped her.

Happy Father's Day Robb!

We went to the Dam to explore. I had to take a picture of Bryce by the brown trout because until you ride in the car with Bryce you don't really understand how gassy a person can be. He was full of hot and stinky air that he was more than happy to rip during our car ride. Emmy at one point said, "I think Bryce needs to see a doctor". Yep, it was that bad. Sorry Bryce you got a blurb in the book about your gas, but you made us all put up with it for 12 hours.

The dam was pretty impressive, and they had recently gotten a lot of rain, so the water was running faster than it normally did.

Bryce and I are scared of heights and Emmy was making him really nervous by leaning on this railing. He kept telling her to get down, so she didn't die.

We had to make all new plans since Yellowstone was still closed. We went into Cody and rented a large ATV that fit our entire family and headed out on a half day of trails. We thought we were going to be gone a max of 3-4 hours. We had already eaten lunch, and everyone had their water bottle with them, so we were good to go. It was odd in the fact that you had to drive your ATV to where the trails started which was a little way away on the highway. The ATV had GPS that mapped out the trails. We were slow at first because the trails were a little steep and washed out. I felt like this might be the longest ride ever when I was scared 15 minutes into it. Caleb thought it was great, but he was upset that he didn't get to drive at all. 

We stopped frequently at first to see all the sites and hike up some cool areas. We saw a lot of Prong Horn which looked like a striped deer. 

We got done with 2 of the 3 trails and the 3rd trail was the one that had the potential to see Wild Mustangs. We were getting hot and thirsty, but we decided to push through. A while into the 3rd trail, we lost the trail. It stopped at a ravine that we weren't able to cross with the 4-wheeler. Robb did some crazy off-road driving and we made it a crossed one time, but we came to another area that was washed out and we had to turn around. We were dying of thirst at this point, and we were all hot and windblown. We came to a main road and asked some random guy if there was a gas station close to get water. He laughed at us and said, "No". He did however give us each a bottle of water in exchange for $5 we had with us. We really had to haul butt to try to get the ATV back to the place on time and we were going to be close when we were on track to finish the trail. When we had to back track, we were Late! We were supposed to keep it under 35mph on the highway and we were going over 55 until it started to make terrible noises and then we slowed it down. We got back an hour and a half late, but the guy wasn't mad. This was everyone's favorite activity at the end. I think it included just enough Are we going to get out of here alive but not any real pressing imminent danger. The best part was we were all covered in dust and mud, and we were excited to go shower off. We however had read the instruction book at the cabin later that morning and figured out that there was a limited amount of water and if you used it all up, they had to haul more up the mountain to you. This may or may not happen the same day that you run out. We had neglected to figure this out until after Robb had taken his usual 20+ min shower that morning. We drew numbers for who got to shower first and by karma (because I had initially "called" the first shower) I was dead last. We set a 3 min time limit for everyone and still only the first 2 people got hot water. We like things to be interesting on vacation!