Pueblo–Cheyenne–Lusk

Very rarely do we stay at KOA (one wag said it stands for Keep On Adding)  facilities.  For the most part, they are over-priced and crawling with children but sometimes we just have to bite the bullet and accept what’s convenient, safe and offers the amenities we require at any given time.  And that’s why we opted to stay at a KOA south of Pueblo – further south than we originally figured but at least it was handy to an easy-access fuel stop with good prices on diesel fuel.  On our first trip in to the city of Pueblo, we visited The Rosemount House, a late 19th-century mansion built by businessman John Thatcher for his wife Margaret and their four children.  Margaret had a thing for pink roses, hence the name of the estate.  Roses feature prominently in many of the furnishings and on the painted ceilings.  Photos are not permitted in the house so you’ll have to go to the website to admire the décor.  Unlike most similar museums, Rosemount is not decorated “in the style of the period”; nearly all the furnishings are original to the house when it was inhabited by the Thatcher family, including ceiling frescos, drapes and other such perishables.  The woodwork is nothing short of spectacular and includes some species of wood that simply aren’t available now.   It was one of the best museums of its type that we’ve seen.

Pueblo is situated on the Arkansas River (pronounced Ar-can-saw just like the state) and boasts a very handsome river walk.  Paddleboats are available for the hale and hearty while the less athletic among us can hire boats with pilots that don’t require a great deal of effort.  It was a blazing hot day so we opted to wander in and out of a few antique shops instead.  We tended to select the ones that were air-conditioned. 

We thought about driving to the town of Florence to sample their antique shops but decided against it and, for our second day, returned instead to Pueblo to scope out the library, the Goodwill and the remaining antique shops.  The Friends of the Pueblo Library used book store is a free-standing building that is bigger than a lot of libraries we’ve seen.  This book shop is so good that we actually made two visits and came away with a big stack of books.  I’m devoting this summer to reading Pulitzer Prize-winning novels and the Friends’ shop had many of them all conveniently arranged in one case so I snatched as many as the pocketbook would allow, concentrating on those I’m unlikely to find elsewhere.

While trolling through a crammed-to-the-rafters antique shop we bumped into Marcia, a friend from back in Geezer Gulch who is also a member of my Questers group and on the Friends’ board.  Small world, huh?  Happens all the time to RVers.  Actually, we knew we’d all be in Pueblo because I’d e-mailed her to suggest she visit Las Vegas on her way home and casually mentioned we’d be stopping in Pueblo.  Long story short, we made arrangements to meet in Pueblo for lunch on Sunday at a venerable Pueblo eatery called Gray’s Coors Tavern.  Somewhere along the line we’d heard that the restaurant has been featured on Guy Fieri’s show on the Food Network where presumably he sampled the restaurant’s most famous dish, The Slopper, but we could find no proof of this on the Internet.  Too bad – he’s really missing something.  The ambiance is nothing fancy but, my friends, The Slopper is just plain good food.  It’s hard to describe so perhaps you’d better check it out on the Web.  Recipes abound but the secret ingredient is the green chili.  Get that right and you are on your way to hog heaven.  While The Slopper may sound dangerous to the digestive tract, it isn’t, but you might want to take along your own side of Alka-Seltzer just in case.

It was overcast when we departed Pueblo but we didn’t encounter any rain.  Our route took us right smack through Denver, right past Mile High Stadium, and then along the Rocky Mountain Front and into the prairie lands of eastern Wyoming, our next stop being Cheyenne.  This was our third or fourth visit to Wyoming’s largest city and so we concentrated on hitting as many antique shops as we could.  We scored a goodly number of eggcups, leaving several lovelies behind which were seriously over-priced.  And the others that got left behind were ugly.  The clouds continued for a lot of our stay but we were spared any heavy T-storms or downpours which unfortunately hasn’t been the case for many areas just ahead of us.

Our next stop was Lusk, Wyoming which is in the eastern half of the state about halfway between Cheyenne and Rapid City.  It had been devastated with a serious flood just a few weeks ago.  Shops and homes near the railroad tracks were badly damaged and the bridge on Highway 18 which crosses the tracks had been washed out.  And that’s exactly the way we needed to go.  Fortunately a brief detour had been devised and we were well under the weight limit allowed so we didn’t have to go a long way out of our way.

There isn’t much to see or do in Lusk but the town does boast some pretty flamboyant characters from the past.  There was the good bad guy (or was he a bad good guy?) Tom Horn who was immortalized in a film of the same name starring Steve McQueen.  And of course Butch and Sundance spent some time in the neighborhood.  And then there was the more recent celebrity, Dell Burke, who operated a pleasure palace across the street from the railroad station.  The Yellow Hotel was demolished not long ago but Dell’s  reputation lingers.  Her feather boa decorates the Ladies’ Room at a local campground. 

We paid a visit to the Stagecoach Museum.  The Cheyenne-Black Hills Stage featured here in front of the museum is a replica but there’s a real one inside.  We were told the only other surviving stage from that route is in the Smithsonian.  Aside from the stagecoach, the museum features a two-head calf, a one-room school house, a general store and a very faded shirt commemorating the first Air Mail Service in the United States.  Niobrara County received the first Air Mail back in 1938.  We were fortunate enough to meet up with one of the museum’s directors who filled us in on all sorts of wonderful tidbits of information.  We were all stumped with the question of who starred in the Tom Horn movie but fortunately a pair of computer savvy volunteers was able to Google the answer for us.  Now if we had a smart phone…..

Bidding farewell to Lusk after only one full day, we headed north and then east toward Rapid City.  The sky was clear, the road lightly trafficked and there was plenty of pretty scenery to see.  This section of Wyoming and South Dakota is grassland, undulating like waves on an ocean, broken up with streams and gullies, stands of trees here and there and enormous vistas so that you can watch the cloud shadows develop and fade  And then, off in the distance to the left, lurk the Black Hills.  And they’ll be featured in our next report.