Road Trip – Omaha to Seattle – Day 23 – Casper, WY – Omaha, NE – October 3, 2010

Not much to report for my last day, I'm afraid. A few things happened, but I'm also writing this blog about 12 days after I got back, so some details are going to be lost at this point. I woke up and left Casper fairly early. Stopped into the office and quickly complained about the room being cold all night. They said it was an old building and that if I would have called last night they would have adjusted my heat for me. They said the thermostats are such where you can only have heat OR air conditioning without having someone come up and adjust something. I told them no big deal and went on my way.
Drove for about two hours and got into Nebraska. In the small town of Harrison, there were three cowboys on horses driving some cattle up the road, that was pretty cool. After that I arrived at the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, one of Nebraska's only National anythings. It was pretty small and tame compared with what I have seen on this trip, but it was interesting and seemed like a good way to wind it down. Evidently, a very long time ago, this area had several watering holes. Animals came to these holes and drank and ate the vegetation around it. There was a drought and the water started drying up, and the vegetation died out as well. Some of the animals ate the vegetation to a radius around the water and then came back to the water for survival. Soon enough though, they had eaten everything within distance and ended up getting stuck at the water with no plants in eating distance. They died in large numbers in the watering hole and so did other scavenging animals. Like 100 years or so ago, these areas were discovered and excavated and it was groundbreaking as far as the period, type of animals, and quality of the remains of these animals.
There are only 2 short hikes in the park, and I decided to do the shorter of the two. First, I looked around the visitor center. They had a lot of Lakota Sioux items on display from James Cook's collection. James Cook became very close to Chief Red Cloud and was a trusted white friend of the Sioux. They personally gave him several items to archive and save for future generations. The exhibit was pretty cool, and today, I was very interested. I then went on my 1 mile roundtrip hike to see the excavation site of daemonelix, which are prehistoric gopher tunnels they had found. It was ok. I was more impressed with the landscape. The sandhills and western Nebraska are actually interesting compared to middle and eastern Nebraska.
Got done around 3 and booked it back to Omaha after that. Only stopped for gas and a Runza dinner in North Platte. Made it back home around 10:30 pm and immediately met Beth, Seth, and Larry at the Interlude lounge. A drink sounded good. It was good to be back.