Friday August 14, Atlantic City Campground, WY

Beautiful sunny, blue sky morning, and a leisurely start. Met another person for my “collection” as we were dumping our waster. Lamar worked for the Flaming Gorge Company that rents out houseboats, and there job was to boat around and empty out the waster tanks on the boats. Their barge with a tank was put on a trailer and towed with the local tow truck up to the dump station to deal with! Interesting who you meet doing the worst job of travelling in an RV. Lamar was very helpful and went over the map with us giving us suggestions for travelling in Wyoming, and in fact where we are staying tonight is as a result of one of his tips.

The drive north up the side of the lake was through open rangeland of sage bush desert. It was vast with some interesting rock formations, but we didn’t see any livestock for 50 miles.

The towns of Green River and Rock Springs were quite sizeable and obviously grew around the railroad, in both their historic town area was on either side of the railroad. Very busy railways, and impressed to watch a full train consisting of 2 pushers and 2 puller engines and 120 wagons, which were stacked 2 high with 40 foot containers, what a great way to transport these across the country.

As has been happening, for the last few days, the storm clouds roll in in the afternoon, really black with lightning but with very little rain. We arrived at the little town of Farson in the middle of a dust storm, the wind really howled around the van, and a local said, “Welcome to Wyoming”! Evidently this is a regular occurrence most afternoons, and before long it had cleared. We had stopped here as the girl in the Rock Springs Info Centre said we must get an icecream here, the best and biggest in Wyoming….and she was right. By the amount of cars everyone else knew about it too. For the first time ever we couldn’t finish them, hard to believe.

Then it was west to a couple of little historic towns that Lamar had recommended, that were off the main highway on unsealed roads. South Pass City had been a gold mining town in the 1860’s with a big population, but as with many of these towns the miners left, but locals continued living there until the 1940’s. In 1960 it was bought by a private group to preserve one of the best frontier mining towns. Felt as though we had stepped back in time as we walked the boardwalks and looked through the old hotels and gambling rooms. It was simple and tourism hadn’t spoilt it thankfully.

Further up the road was Atlantic City, a bit busier and people are now building cabins in the area. Found a great little campground, set in the trees, and we were lucky to get the last site…very peaceful and at $6 we can’t complain!

Notice this year that there are many more of these primitive type campgrounds around, the usually have toilets and some have showers, but no electricity. We find them great, as they are often in very scenic locations and we are very self sufficient with gas water heating, our own shower and I use the invertor to charge laptop and camera batteries….all we need.