Wyoming - Days 11 - 14 - Greybull campground mostly

Greybull KOA, Greybull

Saturday, 11 through Tuesday, 14 September 2021

I spent a lot of my time here doing travel planning.  I chose the places I wanted to visit and planned the driving directions to all these places for the rest of the month.  I made reservations for all the campgrounds I'd visit during the rest of the month, including a reservation at my first campground in Utah.  I also made reservations for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday periods, figuring people would be starting to think about vacation plans soon and wanting to still be able to pick my camping spots.

I finished the posts for South Dakota (about time, since I'm already a third of the way through my month in Wyoming), and I wrote Days 1 and 2 and part of Day 3 for Wyoming.

I'm running out of cash and have learned that the only branch of Chase Bank in the state of Wyoming is in Cheyenne, so I'll plan to stop off there when I'm visiting the capitol building.

Because I'll run out of my prescriptions before I leave Wyoming, I called my doctor in Austin to see about refills.  But since I'm out of Texas, she's not allowed to prescribe for me.  I did a lot of calling around, getting turned down by every clinic in Casper when I explained my situation (apparently they wanted only long-term patients or emergency patients who were bleeding). Finally, I decided to stay in Greybull a bit longer and found a clinic here that could fit me in.

And I'll say this for them, they weren't casual about my visit at all, even though I made it clear I was just passing through.  I brought in my portable blood pressure machine, which was a good thing, because I've been getting readings that were in the totally healthy range, while in their office the readings were nearly off the charts.  So I proved my machine was working just fine by getting a super-high reading just like their readings, and they provisionally decided to hold off on drastic measures.  But the doctor wouldn't write a prescription until I'd taken a blood test, because one of the pills I'm taking is hard on my liver or kidneys or something.

I needed some groceries and Google told me the grocery store in Greybull had closed permanently, so I drove the 8 miles to Basin instead.  The kid who helped take out my groceries told me, when I asked, that there was a park just a couple of blocks away, so I took the dogs over there for a walk.

The park turned out to be behind the library and the courthouse, which I hadn't realized Basin had one of.

Big Horn County Courthouse

I tried to find out how Basin ended up the county seat when Greybull is half-again larger.  I didn't find the answer to that, but I did find an interesting story about the relations between the 1st generation English and German immigrants who were living here during WWI.   https://en.wikipedia.org/Big-Horn-County  That page also notes this county has been reliably Republican since 1936, leading me to wonder if there's some connection between those 2 facts.

When I drove back to Greybull, I tried to find that allegedly closed grocery store, because I couldn't figure out why the smaller town would be the one where the store stayed open.  And I found that Google lied.  The Greybull grocery store was actually a better, more modern store than the one in Basin.  It was next door to a store that had closed, but I could otherwise see no connection.  Google just got lazy and lied.

This KOA is a very small one, and I'd have had a hard time finding places to walk the dogs except it sits right in a residential neighborhood.  So we walked around the neighborhood every day and got to know which houses had dogs.  Nice little place.  On one of those walks I tripped when I was stepping over Gracie's leash and fell on the sidewalk.  Fortunately I fell on my right side, so I had a bruise on my right hip to match the feeling of a bruise (though not an actual one) in my upper left arm - still - after more than 2 full months).

Although it didn't have the sea of gravel that the one in Casper had, this KOA had a lot of gravel but it also had a number of grassy plots.  And each one had a sign saying, "This area is not a pet walk."  Because so many dog owners don't pick up after their pets, I could understand them taking that attitude for the tent area, but it was like that all over.  Still, they had a nice-sized (gravel) off-leash pet area.

I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped while I was here, but when I got here I didn't have any idea where I was going next, so it was a comfort to get that straightened out.