Day Twenty Recap

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” ~Henry Ford

We left the Worland RV Park (only for the day, trailer in-tow) to get back to the repair shop and let them fix a part of the wiring system that was isolated when the wires got ripped out. Len left me at the local McDonald’s which seemed to have the most reliable (free) WiFi in the area. I worked while surreptitiously watching the locals come in and razz one another and shoot the breeze. The woman behind the counter came out with a carafe of coffee and refilled their to-go cups—definitely not your usual McDonald’s atmosphere.

It was much more like a small-town café. For the next three hours I got caught up on blog posts, did a little r.kv.r.y. work, and a bit of computer tidying up of the kind that becomes necessary when you’ve been offline for days and barely online for weeks. I’m still feeling really behind in terms of work responsibilities. Fortunately, I have very patient clients, patient literary journal contributors, a patient writing group, and a patient agent.

At about noon, Len returned and I went back with him to the repair shop but they were off for lunch, so we opened the galley (chuckwagon!) and I made sandwiches while we waited for them to return. The issue continued for three hours this time as now four—count ‘em—FOUR expert mechanic shops have tried to diagnose this brake issue to no avail. These guys even gave Len a thermometer gun to register the actual amount the brakes were overheating (a good thing, actually, proof that they were HOT). After a couple miles of driving, he clocked the left brake at 101 degrees and the right one at 200.

When you’re facing an unsolved/unresolved issue like this—especially one that involves safety—it runs constantly in the back of your brain, distracting you from the duties and pleasures of the moment. It’s like a computer that gets hung up on some process—CPU all being funneled to a program running in the background that may or may not be a destructive virus. We would like to do a reset, please. Ctrl Alt Delete.

At around 3pm, Wyoming showed us her WILD side. Hellacious winds kicked up so that we couldn’t even see the road in places for the storm of dust accompanied by lightning, thunder, hail, and finally buckets of rain. Through it all the wind howled, with (we later learned) gusts of up to 80mph. When it started, it was 83 degrees out. A half an hour later, is was 57 degrees.

We rode out most of the storm in the parking lot of the Washakie Museum & Cultural Center, then went inside and toured again. It was all about the history of the Big Horn Basin, including ancient history. Some great fossil exhibits, including some exciting mammoth skeletons, a Last West exhibit about settlers that came to the Basin after 1900, a ghost town exhibit, and lots of good Native exhibits.

We left when they closed at 5pm and came back to our campsite only to discover that the extreme winds had brought down one of those giant trees right above our campsite. We were lucky we’d had to take the trailer out of that site today. The owners gave us a new campsite (an upgrade) but it was right in front of the office so when I cooked dinner I felt a little conspicuous. Right out in the open, stirring, mixing, cooking, and serving. Maye I should start my own cooking show—Chuckwagon Woman. I made something spicy that resembled chilaquiles without the eggs, using my pressure cooker as a saucepan.

I climbed into the trailer to stretch and do a meditation and promptly fell asleep. As wonderful as this all is, I am seriously starting to wear out. We’ll see if we go all the way to the end or pull up stakes sooner.

Tomorrow: Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracks and a night in Greybull, Wyoming.