Cody is certainly an interesting place, made more interesting by its founder. Buffalo Bill Cody was in turns heroic and a scoundrel, and one of the most interesting people we’ve learned about in a long time.

We started the day back at the Buffalo Bill Center, and spent our morning enjoying their art gallery and the Buffalo Bill exhibit. The art was an awful lot of fun…the paintings and sculptures were great. It’s always interesting to see how artists interpret the things they see. There was a nice comparison of two paintings showing the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

The Buffalo Bill gallery was really interesting, describing the many facets of a very interesting man. He made a fortune, and lost a fortune in just a short number of years. Cody became friends with an amazing cross-section of notable people in the late 1800’s. It was intriguing enough that we found a bookstore and looked for a biography. It’s now on my nightstand, along with a history of early Yellowstone NP.

We took a drive over to a very nice quilt shop (this may be an ongoing theme on this trip), then back downtown for a one hour trolley ride around town. The tour gave us some really interesting facts; for instance, the red light district was conveniently located between the train station and the hotel/saloons.

Last we went back to the Irma Hotel to watch a shootout in the street. It was an interesting performance, and we were glad we had a front row seat to history (that repeats nightly at 6 PM).

So tomorrow is a travel day, we leave for Gillette, Wyoming to get ready for the Family Motorcoach Assocation convention. We take a RV backing class on Saturday, then Leila gets busy helping with welcoming folks on their way in. More later…