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We're going to Yellowstone!

Brighton Travel Blog › entry 1 of 12 › view all entries

Roadtrip to Yellowstone National Park. We visited family in Cody, WY on the way there. We made a long pitstop to sit in the hot springs of Thermopolis, WY on the way back, and to visit family in Cheyenne.

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We're going to Yellowstone!

August 11, 1995

Received this Visitor Guide from the Cody CoC

After our wildly successful and educational family vacation lat year, I had made up my mind that we would take a family vacation every year. We were doing well financially, and we could afford to allocate enough money to have a decent trip each year.

I always start planning well in advance. So Christmas of 1994 had not arrived yet, and I was thinking about where we should go. It was at that time that Jolene, my eldest daughter, came into my home office, looking for some help with her homework. She was working on a report for Yellowstone National Park. This sounded like the perfect place to go.

It had been seven years since the devastating fires of Yellowstone, so I figured that the area would be well on its way to recovery.

From the Cody, WY CoC

Heading to Wyoming also gave us a reason to visit Margo’s Aunt Helen and Uncle Gary, who lived in Cody, WY. Cody is the unofficial east entrance to Yellowstone. While Cody is over 50 miles from the park, and there is one other city, Wapiti, on the way to the East Entrance, Cody has many amenities and attractions.

Last year, when we went on our cross country trip, Margo and I had written to the Chamber of Commerces for every town we planned to stop in. This year that procedure would only require one letter. The rest of my research was going to come from maps, encyclopedia, motel directories, and Prodigy.

Prodigy was one of the very early internet players. In 1995 it, along with CompuServ were the two big dogs. Prodigy was mostly still just an internet portal. It supplied the user (Me) with news, information, basic e-mail, and message boards.

Remeber Prodigy?

My 1995 it had a very basic web browser, but web content back then was in its infancy. Most of what I got came from Mobil Oil Corp, which provided the travel information for Prodigy. You got only text, no pictures, or graphics. These were also the days when a dial up modem of 2400 bps was considered blazing fast. So even if there were pictures it would take for ever to download. Broadband connections today are in the neighborhood of 20,000,000 bps. Just four orders of magnitude.

That concludes your Internet history lesson for the day. The research I did soon had an itinerary and the list of things we wanted to do. We would leave on Saturday, Aug 12^th, and drive to Cody. The 13^th and 14th would be spent visiting family, touring the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, The Old Trail Town, and taking in a rodeo. Then the 15^th, 16^th, and morning of the 16^th we would take in the wonders of Yellowstone. We would spend the night of 17^th in Casper, WY. On the 18^th we would drive to Cheyenne and visit the grave of my brother, and visit Margo’s cousin. Then home that night.