Not a whole lot to tell today because our day was cut short…

It was windy when we left North Platte this morning and it just kept getting windier on the highway. Around Cheyenne, Wyoming, we started seeing the lighted highway signs warning about high winds, anywhere from 45 to 65 miles per hour gusts. We wondered if we were going to be stopped again as we had before. We passed the off-ramp where we had stopped last time, halfway between Cheyenne and Laramie. That year, after trying to wait it out for a while on the off-ramp with a bunch of semis, we had finally decided to turn back around and stay in Cheyenne. We stayed there two nights before the winds died down and we could continue our trip. I am trying to remember if that was just last year or sometime earlier.

We unhooked the truck at the Lincoln monument I’ve taken pictures of before and I drove down the steep hill behind Mark. I saw the wind pushing him around, but it wasn’t doing anything to my pickup truck. It’s just the broad side of an RV or a semi that gets hit hard in this kind of wind. It’s a good thing Mark has experience driving in any kind of road condition!

This time we actually made it to Laramie before the highway signs said that the highway was closed ahead to large trucks and trailers. It was only about 2:10 when we pulled off and got a space at the KOA near the highway. I had seen a sign before we turned off that said we could see Butch Cassidy’s “Big House” (prison), but the folks at the registration desk at KOA said it closed at 3:00, so we didn’t go. That gave us an entire afternoon to just hang around the RV. The winds are howling around us like some kind of haunted sound effects.

Another memory this has called up for us was our honeymoon when we took a 1987 RV (in 2008) into Canada and then came down into Montana. We were the only RV in the KOA RV park next to Glacier National Park, and that night, a wind came howling down the mountains. The older RVs didn’t have stabilizers and we were getting rocked hard all night. I clung to Mark most of the night and was envisioning getting tipped over during the night, but that didn’t happen, thank God! Mark and I were talking about how grateful we are to have stabilizers on this RV!