A Slight Intermission
After a morning of hiking at Devils Tower, Mom and I, as you have probably already guessed, continued driving west. This time, our goal was to make it to Jackson Hole, Wyoming by the end of the day. It is roughly an eight hour drive, not counting any stops or taking into consideration traffic, but seeing how we were once again in the middle of nowhere, congested roads were not on the top of my ‘things to worry about’ list; running out of gas or being hit by the world’s largest tumble weed took precedent on that drive.
Low and behold, around early afternoon we saw those infamous ‘Road Work Ahead’ signs and we quickly came upon a flagger standing in the road with a stop sign. As we rolled to a stop, the flagger started strolling on over to us. Now, you know how in fairy tales when travelers attempt to cross a bridge but then a troll stops them and makes them pay or turn around? The next fifteen to twenty minutes of my mom and I’s life was like that, except in this rendition ‘the bridge’ was a solitary road in the middle of Wyoming and our ‘payment’ was listening to this guy talk about random things. Don’t get me wrong, he was just doing his job and he was nice, but the car behind us had to think that he was our long lost best friend.
When the opposite traffic finally finished passing, we were given the “okay” to go and we discovered why we had been sitting still for such a long time. Unlike in the midwest where construction zones block off lanes for only a few miles at a time, apparently in Middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, they block off nearly twenty plus miles at a time.
Fast forward a few hours, we are nearly half way across the state at this point and we sure enough come across a ‘Road Closed’ sign and a couple of workers. One of the men comes over to our car and he explains that due to flooding, we would have to take a detour. He then gave us a piece of paper with no more than five roads on it and one route was highlighted and our directions consisted of, “just follow that route and turn here;” it was at this point that Mom and I were both convinced that we would miss the detour and get lost in the depths of Wyoming.
I honestly don’t really remember anything else from our drive across Wyoming, until we reached the Tetons. According to my notes, driving across the state was really boring and “even worse than South Dakota.” I don’t particularly remember this stretch of our drive being that bad, so either Wyoming was so boring that I completely blocked it from my memory or the real issue here lies with the fact that I keep driving across entire states in one day.