Saturday, June 2: Wowza! Hot water!! Hobo Hot Springs in Saratoga, Wyoming has a community swim pool and two hot spring pools. The first is a cool 104 degrees. The second is 116 or more! Yikes! We tried the hot pool first and just couldn’t do it, so we pre-cooked ourselves in the 104 pool and then tried the hot again. Success! After a good long soak and a shower I felt fantastic. I was doing deep knee bends, just because I could with no pain. Terrific! Hobo Hot Pools are open 24/7 with no fee. What an awesome asset for a town to have.
We checked out the local grocery. Wyoming all the way, with dead animal trophy’s hanging on around the perimeter walls and a big grizzly at the door to greet you. The parking lot was full of pickup trucks, some shiny clean, others plastered with a good coating of ranch dust. When we left the grocery we came upon a mule deer doing some shopping on main street! We treated ourselves to a restaurant lunch. I got a kick out of the embroidered sign in the bathroom.
Saratoga has a neat little museum with displays about rocks and the dinosaur diggings in the area. I was quite taken with the size of a mastodon tooth. HUGE! We took a short walk over the North Platte River. The river is adjacent to the hot springs. There were young teen boys lolling about in a rock pool at rivers edge where the hot water discharges and mixes with the cold river water.
The next morning John left a rock and we hitched up and picked up I-80 again, headed for Rock Springs, Wyoming.