Day 11

Thursday 10th May 2007<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Mary had a bad night last night, not helped by the fact that I was sweating like a pig… enough of the personal details and on to the travelogue.  We first successfully followed the receptionist’s directions to the local post office, where we were able to dispatch our birthday greetings to our granddaughter who will be 6 next week.  We also sent printed versions of the blogs to our mothers, neither of whom is quite up to modern technology.  Printing them was a hassle, thanks to Mary’s innovation of embedding pictures in the documents, and the fact that the motel only had an older version of word and no colour cartridges in the colour printer. The first 3 pictureless blogs were all 40KB or less.  Blog 4 was 4.4MB and Blog 5 2.8MB.  Once converted to earlier versions of Word, they bloated to 70MB and 41MB respectively.  No wonder Sara, our daughter, complained of slow downloads after Mary emailed them to her.  Anyway, I’m putting a stop to that nonsense, but not for the blogs sent to our daughters as they want the pictures and anyway Mary has final editorial say over what I write and vice versa.  The written word will have to be good enough for everyone else until I can find out how to let you have the pictures as well.

 

Now, wherewas I? Oh yes, the staff at the post office were much friendlier and more helpful than the New York ones, but they still told us off for not putting a return address on our envelope.  What exactly would have been the point?  We’re not returning to New York and a return address in England would have been useless.  In the mean time we’re constantly on the move.

 

Anyway, onwards to the West we went, dropping in at “Fort Hays” where they have moved the set for Ft Hays, where several scenes from Dances with Wolves were set.  Apparently it had been filmed some 16 miles away, and the production company had left the scenery where it was, on private land.  Someone had then purchased it all, dismantled it and taken it to its new location.  It is said the Kevin Costner is a stickler for authenticity and they even had to find square nails to put everything together. We then checked out Hill City and then headed North through the Black Hills (via the inevitable roadworks that we keep stumbling upon – this time having to follow a safety car through them) to Deadwood City, scene of Wild Bill Hickock’s demise, shot through the back of the head by Jack McCall, who was acquitted by a hastily convened miners’ court on the grounds that Hickock had killed his brother.  He was subsequently found guilty by a more formal court elsewhere.

 

We had a fascinating 40 minutes reading the material and watching a video in the visitors’ centre, which of course attempted to debunk all the wild west myths and build up the image of a worthy Victorian middle class that has persisted to this day, financing the town’s restoration by legalising gambling and subventing all gambling taxes to the Deadwood Restoration Society.  They also questioned the relationship between Wild Bill and Calamity Jane: apparently she hardly knew him even though she claimed that they had a sexual relationship. They also said she was nowhere near as attractive as any of the actresses that had portrayed her.   We then had a snack in a casino, which was allegedly where Jack McCall had been arrested, (chicken strips for Mary, “Buffalo Burger” for me) and bored ourselves stupid trying to spend a dollar on a fruit machine.  As soon as we thought we’d nearly lost it the bugger went and won nearly all our money back so we had to persevere till it was all lost.

 

Mission accomplished, we headed for Tatanka the place Kevin Costner is supposed to have set up that honors the long gone bison, and also houses a display of the clothes worn in his various films both by him and his co-stars.  Unfortunately it doesn’t open till May 27 – Memorial Day.  Never mind, back through Deadwood we went and took the road through Lead to the Spearfish Canyon, which was a delightful descending drive by a babbling brook (or “creek” as the Americans would have it), down a winding canyon of ever deepening impressiveness, light granite and limestone rocks in rugged display, offset by dark green ponderosa pines and pale green birches, under a mostly bright blue sky.  In a couple of places, man has dammed the stream creating small ponds and then dry river beds for long stretches – rather sad.  Eventually the canyon opens out and softens into a vale where the town of Spearfish nestles and our road rejoined the Interstate 90.

We followed that for a few miles through quite pleasant green grassland, broken by low hills and low red sandstone cliffs or bluffs, then turned off once more to investigate the Vore Buffalo Jump, which turned out to be a small hole in the ground into which ancient American Indian hunters used to drive herds of buffalo, thus achieving a huge return on investment of effort as they could kill lots of bison at one time and used every part of the dead beasts to improve their lives.  The site was used for hunting by several tribes until about 1800, when it became obsolete, as they acquired the horse around that time (wild ponies, introduced by the Spanish, having migrated north across the plains) and this provided scope for better hunting techniques.

 

From there, we penetrated deeper into the Wyoming countryside, through the delightful Bell Fourche valley, to the Devil’s Tower, or, as various Indian tribes had called it, the Bear’s Lodge, an enormous great rock, sticking out of the plain with no apparent rhyme or reason, made of red granite or sandstone, coated in what appear to be lichens and sulphur, giving it varied colours.  It also has a tubular structure.  Its surface is corrugated and each corrugation seems to be a separate column of stone that, every now and then breaks off and tumbles down to the scree of boulders below.  We also managed to photograph an interesting part of the rock that looked like a face. There were lots of rock doves, martins, turkey vultures and robins in evidence, plus a few other species I didn’t manage to recognise or diagnose.  Before we got to it, though, we had to drive carefully past a prairie dog town, where the “little fellows” (as the National Park attendant denoted them) stood and watched us drive past.  The sentries were much more concerned by the vultures than the cars.

 

Now our thoughts were turning to bedtime and food, so we setConnie to guide us to Buffalo, Wyoming, but after a long drive south on US14 and then a further stretch West on I90, we acknowledged the setting of the sun and pulled in at a Super 8 in Gillette, Wyoming.  Our initial impressions of this city are dire: there is an open-cast coal mine nearby and an enormous cement works.   The car park of the motel was completely populated with 4x4 pickup trucks and a gaggle of good ole boys, but we pulled in anyway and got ourselves a good ground-floor room in this establishment, owned by Khan Enterprises Inc.

 

We went out for a meal, stopping off in a liquor store in case we had to put up with another “family restaurant”, which always seem to be alcohol free, and bought a couple of bottles of plonk: the very same Rex Goliath 47 lb Rooster Cabernet Sauvignon, that cost me $14.99 plus sales tax in one New York wine shop and $10.99 in another just down the road, cost only $7.19 plus tax here.  With this insurance policy in place, we started investigating places to eat.  Granny’s Kitchen, opposite, which has been recommended by the lady in the liquor shop, was a dump.  We actually looked inside but no waitress or waiter appeared to welcome us and the whole appearance was bleak, so we legged it and headed up 2nd Ave to Douglas, where we’d been advised there were a couple of decent places.  As we began to despair of finding anywhere, we lit upon the Prime Rib Restaurant and Blue Martini Wine Bar and chanced our arm there.  From the outside it didn’t look good but it claimed a few local awards … It turned out to have a comprehensive wine list that went on for several pages and included several bottles for over $1,000: indeed at least three cost $1,400.  We settled for the Wild Horse Paso Robles Cabernet Sauvignon for a mere $27.  Perfectly potable it proved too, accompanying a starter of mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat and cheese, followed by a fillet steak topped with black peppercorns and mango chutney for Bob and a halibut steak for Mary.  The steak was a bit overdone for “medium rare” but only marginally so and was wonderfully tender, if a bit over-powered by the sauce.  The vegetables, baby carrots and cauliflower, were excellent: still crisp, with not a trace of sogginess.  In line with past diners at the restaurant we signed the label on our bottle of wine to be displayed amongst the many others around the restaurant. Our waitress had recently moved here from Denver to be with her fiancé: not a choice I think she’ll find easy to palate, but I could be wrong.  Maybe there is a vigorous cultural scene in Gillette but it is not nearly as visible as in Sioux Falls or Rapid City, where at least the towns had some pretensions towards street art and architecture.  Here there seems to be nothing worth keeping…