Casper, WY here we come

We left out this morning at 8:00 headed for Casper, Wy.  Doug had found a short cut to Hwy 79 from the campground.  He did all his research, including looking at the entire route by satellite.  It looked good and shorted our trip by 20 miles.  Off we went.  It started out great.  Everything looked good. This "shortcut" was only 4-5 miles.  About 30 minutes later we had made a big circle and was back on HWY 16 but about 3 miles further down the road.  I waved at the campground as we passed it.  We eventually did pass the road we were suppose to come out on, and it had a sign 5.2 miles to Happy Holiday RV Park.  Our mistake, a turn off that was a gravel road.  Doug didn't take it.  When he followed the road on satellite, he didn't see a gravel road.  In hindsight, that gravel road probably wasn't gravel for a very long time.   Lesson learned, either follow GPS or throw the thing out the window.
Now back to our day.  It did get better.

It was another beautiful drive.

We came across some of the short fences.  They didn't fence in anything.  They were just short pieces of fencing.  What are they for?  Jim said they were to control snow drifts.  Is that right?

We went thru some neat old towns.  This one was the town of Lusk.

The colors were amazing.  The cloud formations were abundant.  It was just a good day.  I tried to get a picture of the speed limit sign.  why, you ask?  Speed limit was 80!  I thought we were back in Texas!  We didn't go that fast.  I promise.  Another thing that made me think we were in Texas, Amarillo to be exact, there were wind warnings today.  35 MPH +  Of course, that is low wind gusts for Amarillo! LOL

                                         Purple mountains majesty, now I see where that came from.

                                          Do you see the gorilla profile, or have I been taking too many pictures?

                                            I loved this cloud formation.

 You will have to blow this one up to see them, but there are antelope in them there fields!  I had to ask what they were.  LOL

                                               An old Oil drilling derrick .

                                    River running by our campground.

                                                  our site for the night

Our view out the side window

Is this sage brush... looks like a green tumble weed.