This isn't a full "day" from our trip, but is worth of a post of it's own.

After leaving Yellowstone, we headed to Hunter Peak Ranch, our next abode for the night.  I found the place with a combination of Google and Garmin's Mapsource.  In short, we could only get two nights in Yellowstone Park, so I started hunting for a close place to stay for the third night.  Hunter Peak Ranch popped up and seemed to be the nicest of the batch. 

We pulled in around 6 pm or so, as dinner was scheduled for 7.  When I made the reservation, I was informed that dinner is cooked based on the number of guests and that we'd better be there by 7, otherwise food would be wasted!

Shelley greeted us and showed us to our quarters.  There was an explanation of it not being the rooms we'd requested due to other families wanting the loft, staying longer than we were and not having enough people to use the room they'd originally planned on.  I was kind of expecting that meant we were getting something less than we'd originally booked, but I was quite mistaken.

What we got was the entire bottom floor of the lodging house...  Four or five bedrooms, six beds, kitchen, laundry room, two bathrooms, living room, huge dining room and two entrances.  WAY better than the "two rooms" we'd originally booked.  We had plenty of space to bring in everything off the bikes, reshuffle all our gear, do laundry, set up laptops for routing, lounge on the couches drinking local beer, etc.  Very nice compared to the rest of our accommodations. :)  If you check the picture above, we had the ENTIRE bottom floor of that building.

There was also an abundance of ground squirrels.

We did a quick cleanup of ourselves and headed over to the main office for dinner.  Dinner was "family style", meaning they bring out a bunch of food, set it on a table and everyone goes and gets what they want.  Blackened chicken, string beans, nachos, potatoes and smthng else I forget filled my plate.  All of it cooked on a wood burning stove or a fire pit out back. :)  Desert was peach cobbler, huckleberry ice cream, and/or huckleberry crumble.  I chose the "and" route and it was all excellent. ;)

After dinner, I wandered around a bit and talked to some of the hosts and guests at the fire pit.  I managed to get a couple of pictures before the light disappeared and made friends with the two very well-behaved dogs.

I then retired back to the lodge and joined Jim and Rich for laundry, frosty beverages, lies and politics.

We finally ran out of frosty beverages and decided to check out the night sky away from our usual city light pollution.  Wow!  I don't remember the last time I was able to actually see the Milky Way band of stars.  There wasn't a cloud in the sky and it literally looked like a sky we never get to see.  We were able to easily see satellites and planets.  There were so many stars, we couldn't find any real constellations other than the big dipper.  I'm used to being able to pick them out instantly, but there was just so much that it just looked like one big field of lights.  Shooting stars were constant, at a rate of one every 1 to three minutes.  Keep in mind that this was about a month before any scheduled meteor showers!  I can't imagine what it would be like with a full on shower. 

When our necks got sore enough, we headed back in, did some basic packing for the morning and called it a night.

The next morning, we awoke in time for breakfast.  Home made sausage, french toast, really good bacon, fresh yogurt, eggs over easy, excellent coffee, fresh orange juice, huckleberry jelly, and I don't remember the rest.  We showed some restraint, as we had a full day on the bikes ahead of us, but it was awesome. :)

I wandered a bit more after breakfast and got some more pictures in decent light.  The ranch property is actually quite a bit bigger than the area we were using.  The main selling point is horse rides through the forests and mountains, which is what most of the guests were there for.  There is a river (possibly Soda Butte Creek) running through the property, which crossable either on horse, or via a trolley bridge.  For those that haven't a clue what I'm talking about, a trolley bridge is basically a cable system with a trolley suspended on rollers.  You sit on the trolley and pull yourself across on the cables.  I didn't have time to play with it, but one of the families staying there assured me that it works and that one of the daughters had gotten kinda "stuck" on it in the middle of the river. ;)

It was finally time for us to get going, so we finished packing everything up and cleaning up our lodge.  We ran over a quick final check of the route for Rich (he was heading back to Utah, while Jim and I continued on "Eastward").  After everything was all packed, checked, etc., we said goodbye to Rich and Jim and I headed towards Cody, WY.

That'll be in the next post!