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 76th
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!
Kayce
