NOVEMBER 17 – DAY OFF, SHERIDAN, WY
Day 161. 38,308 miles. Drove all afternoon across Montana on I-90 and then down into Wyoming, where we stopped around 10pm to find a hotel for the night. We exited in the town of Sheridan and pulled into the first Super 8 that we saw. Devin checked into it. “Fifty-five bucks but the beds are just doubles.” No dice. We continued down the road and pulled into a seedy-looking motel that David was really into “We gotta stay here, this is total Wyoming!” Devin seemed game, but I wasn’t convinced, and Patrick put his foot down. We continued on to the flashing sign of Trail’s End Motel. “Now this is a winner!” we all agreed. Devin checked into it, and the deal was made. In the lobby, there was a basket of complimentary Otis Spunkmeyer cookies. Next to the lobby was a night bar with Karaoke happening. We got a double room that was near the indoor pool. We checked into our room and then moseyed over to the bar to check out the scene. Outside, Devin and David met some dudes who were stoked to meet a travelling band. One of them, Kyle, bought both of our CDs, and another one named Andrew gave us his name and the names of some places and people to contact if we ever came back to play a show in Sheridan.
Inside the bar we got a pitcher of beer and looked through the karaoke songbook which was predominantly country tunes. “Looks like we’re stepping out of our element tonight boys,” Patrick declared. We couldn’t convince David to sing a song, but the three of us put in our entries. Devin was up first singing Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting For You.” Patrick followed with Frank Sinatra’s “Let’s Fall In Love” and I batted cleanup doing Three Dog Night’s version of “Easy To Be Hard.” We clowned around a bit and some of the locals really took to us. There were a lot of nice folks in the place that night, and a lot of them seemed excited to meet a travelling band. “Bands don’t come through here very often,” they told us. Kyle bought us some more pitchers of beer and the night was rolling. We cheered on other folks as they sang, and our favorite was an elderly gentleman, a retired Navy war veteran who goes by the name ‘Pappy.’ He sang a number of old time country tunes, and he joined Patrick, David and I as we sang the backup choruses to Devin’s karaoke trademark “Rhinestone Cowboy.” After the bar closed we turned down an offer to go out to another bar in town. We still had a long drive to Denver the next day, and we have been very behind on getting a decent night’s sleep. We went back to the room but first Devin, David and I hit the pool late, and swam off some of our drunkenness. Even though we had the night off from playing and decent beds to share, we still did not get very much sleep since we were again up late. And we were surely not going to miss the hot breakfast buffet the next morning so we set our alarms early.
The word we heard: “I told those girls ‘if I were thirty or fourty years younger I’d give you whisker burn’” -Pappy
Joe: sit back and relax on the throne like a king, you won’t be driving through Wyoming
Karaoke: Right Here Waiting For You / Let’s Fall In Love / Easy To Be Hard / Rhinestone Cowboy