Satyrs, Cowboys, Bikers…Oh My!

Hey ya’all, how’s everyone doin’ out there?  Good, I hope.  Sorry I’ve been MIA, but I was on vacation.  And you know how it is when you’re traveling and having fun and your technology takes a crap?  Yep…you just ignore the fact that you can’t make a phone call, can’t send a text, can’t get online to do your blog, can’t get to your calendar—and you just proceed to have too much fun!  Which is what I’ve been doing.

A couple of weeks ago, I loaded up my twenty-year-old grandson, who is an absolute delight, and we headed off to see what kind of trouble we could get into.  I know…a young man on the precipice of adulthood and his crazy-ass gramma…what the hell can go wrong with that?  LOL

Well, we started out by spending our first night in Vegas, and The Fremont Street Experience was just what we needed to set the tone for our trip.  You shoulda seen the look on my grandson’s face as he strolled down Fremont Street for the first time, amidst all of the winners, losers, actors, and freaks that congregate in downtown Vegas.

We saw numerous women in pasties and leather offering spankings, we saw Kiss, we saw Superman, we saw Jack Sparrow, we saw Chewbacca, and we saw the skinniest Spiderman ever!  But no Elvis.  What the hell?  What’s Vegas without the Elvis impersonators?  Where do I lodge a complaint?

Without fail, the best thing we saw on Fremont Street was a guy we referred to as “goat boy”.  He was supposed to be a Satyr—half man, half goat—and his antics were as fascinating as his wardrobe.  It was sort of like a train wreck…no way could you look away, and he was a master at catching you staring and embarrassing you in the process.  LOL Yep...those are dollar bills tucked into that speedo, and that is a furry jockstrap...and, no, I'm not telling you where those dollar bills came from!

But the funniest thing to me was that he seemed to be friends with the balloon lady, who was making balloon animals for kids of all ages.  Yep, the balloon lady on Fremont Street has a dark side—she hangs with a guy with horns and hooves, who wears speedos and a furry jockstrap.  If that ain’t a dark side, I don’t know what is!

Next, we headed to Yellowstone National Park & the Grand Tetons, where we witnessed amazing scenery and all kinds of wildlife.  Gorgeous and highly recommended.  DO NOT MISS THIS!!!

From Yellowstone, we headed down through one of my favorite towns—Dubois Wyoming—where I’m sad to report there was a huge forest fire.  Hoping no homes were destroyed!!!  We stayed long enough to eat breakfast at the Cowboy Café, which is not to be missed if you are ever in Dubois—great food and lots of it!  Get a hat…I did.

Then from Dubois, we continued on to Riverton, Wyoming, to stay with some friends of ours for a few days.  Huge thanks to Jim and Paulette Moss for a great time at their ranch roping and steer wrestling.  What is not to love about a ranch full of great looking men in tight Wranglers, on horseback, roping and wrestling bulls?  Be still my heart!!!  I cannot wait to go back!  And for those of you interested in horse and rodeo news, Jim and Paulette put out a great publication—The Wrangler.  You can find it at:  http://www.thewrangler.com/ .

From there, we headed across Wyoming to The Devil’s Tower—a massive rock structure that juts 867 feet straight up into the air!  For those of you who saw the movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, it is the mountain whose image plagues the main character all throughout the movie.  And after my grandson talked me into hiking my ass up and down the path around the base of the mountain, that image plagued me for a few hours too.

Anyway, for those of you planning a trip to the Wyoming/South Dakota area, this is a don’t-miss attraction.  This picture was taken from in front of our KOA camping cabin…what a view!

From the Devil’s tower, we headed east into South Dakota, where we visited Mount Rushmore.  Fabulous and incredible, and another don’t-miss attraction.


Where else can you go to talk to four dead presidents?  Okay, so I didn’t actually talk to them out loud, right out in public, in the middle of a huge international crowd—but I thought about it.  ‘Cuz those were some smart guys and I got a thing or two to ask them about the upcoming presidential election.

Just sayin…

So, any trip to South Dakota wouldn’t be complete without seeing Deadwood and Sturgis.  Right?  Well, remember Stupid Girl?  The wreckless one who camps on my couch from time to time?  Yeah, her.  This time she caused me to make reservations to visit Sturgis—and later I find out it’s just one week before the big 76^th Anniversary Sturgis run.  You know, the one where a small town in South Dakota fills up with hundreds of thousands of bikers.  Yep…me, my grandson, and fifty-thousand bikers on the streets of Sturgis.  LOL 

Ya gotta do it at least once, right?

Well, we’re walking down the streets of Sturgis and I ask my grandson, “Does it look to you like that woman across the street is topless?”

He looks just as she turns our way and her purple pasties are bobbing in the wind—loud and proud—and he replies, “Yep, she sure is.”

Another thing I’m going to have to explain to my son when I get his oldest son back to Arizona.  Can you say Bad Gramma?!

At some point around this time, we hit Deadwood, and since it’s so close to Sturgis, it was almost a replay of our stroll around Sturgis...in fact, I'm not sure if this picture is from Sturgis or Deadwood.  Only this time, Stupid Girl has the lack of good sense to let the twenty-year-old go into a smoke shop. But gramma doesn’t care to go in and brave all the smoke, so she lets the kid go in alone to buy a Deadwood cigar.  Really?

About twenty minutes had passed and countless really rough/shady looking characters had exited the shop—and still no grandson.  So I started to thinking I might have to go in and brave the smoke to make sure my baby was okay, and pull him out of that den of iniquity.  Sure, he’d be embarrassed, but he might need gramma as backup!  Just as I started for the steps that led down (yes, it was in a basement) to the smoke shop, here comes my sweet twenty-year-old, blonde, hazel-eyed angel out the door with his new cigar in hand.  Yeah!

Nothing to worry about.  Right?  But when he tells me that he had a moment of WTF when he started looking around at the characters who were in there and got a little nervous that he stood out like a sore thumb.  There I was again...Bad Gramma.

With the nonsense behind us, we headed down through Custer State Park, where we saw big herds of bison, as well as one big guy taking a leisurely stroll down the side of the main highway, to the delight of the tourists.  Very cool!!!

So, that’s pretty much what I did on my summer vacation—hung with a satyr and a balloon woman with a dark side, stared at Wrangler butts, hiked around a weird iconic mountain with a reputation for alien abductions, dodged motorcycles and flying pasties, and endangered my grandson.  Not bad for only two weeks on the road!  You wanna go with me next time?  No, I didn’t think so.  LOL

Well that’s my story, weird and wild, and I’m stickin’ to it.  Hang on tight now, ‘cuz we’re gonna go real, real fast!

Love ya,

Kayce