How exciting Wyoming...Isn't

We decided to end summer with a big bang and go somewhere exciting for Labor Day.  We spent all summer close to home since we had Skyler.  Jason's dad lives in Kemmerer, Wyoming and for a long time Jason has said we should drive up there and take the kids to Fossil Butte National Monument.  So Labor Day was the day

Before I go any farther, I better explain my title in case I've already offended any of my readers who might be from the great state of Wyoming.  Wyoming has some absolutely breathtakingly beautiful parts.  Jason has been dreaming of a back packing trip to the Wind Rivers for years and Yellowstone is one of my favorite places.  However, I have driven on I-80 across Wyoming too many times and it is just not a place I would choose to spend much time.  Having gotten that out of the way we did have high hopes of digging up some exciting fossils or something even though I knew we weren't headed to the beautiful mountains.

We stopped in Kemmerer to pick up Jason's dad.  It's one of those blink and you'll miss it towns.  The highlight to Kemmerer is the first JC Penney store.  I'm not sure how it got started way out there but it did.  We didn't stop to tour the building though.  We'll have to save that for our next trip.  It's dreadfully cold and snowy in the winter although summer is probably quite pleasant.  Then we headed over to the National Monument that is only a few minutes away.  The visitor's center was nice and had a lot of interesting fossils to look at.  The kids had fun doing their junior ranger books and earning their badges.  We were hoping to hike to the fossil quarry where you could actually watch them dig out fossils but that was closed.  So the fun was limited to what was at the visitors center.

After a picnic lunch that involved a lot of teasing Jared about spiders, we headed to Fort Bridger.  When we got there it was swarming with people and no where to park.  I really don't think that many people even live in southwestern Wyoming.  We finally found a place to park and walked over to the fort only to find everyone cleaning up from a weekend mountain man rendezvous that had been going on.  There were hundreds of vendors there which meant the kids were constantly asking me to buy them something.  Unfortunately we got there too late to see any of the presentations that had been going on over the weekend or it probably would have been quite interesting.  Instead there were people backing up vehicles and trailers everywhere and taking down tents and I was clinging to the kids hoping they wouldn't get run over.  The fort itself looked pretty cool but we just got there at a terrible time to see it.

So even though we enjoyed spending the day with Jason's dad, next time I'm looking for an exciting day trip I'll probably head somewhere other than Wyoming...