Thursday, August 25: General Custer and the gas incident

      Since we had to be in Gillette, Wyoming on Friday morning between 9 and noon for the Escapees Convention, we made reservations at an RV park in Buffalo, about an hour’s drive from Gillette, for Thursday night. We had plenty of time to get to buffalo, so when we saw a sign for the Battle of the Little Big Horn National Monument, we decided to stop. As everyone knows, this is where General Custer made his famous last stand. We gathered for a ranger talk under a canopy in back of the visitor’s center with the hill where Custer made his last stand only 100 yards in front of us. The ranger talked for about ½ hour and did an impressive job of giving us the background on the circumstances which led up to the battle, and (what I didn’t know) she told us that there were several other companies of troops not with Custer and other battles nearby. The main problem they had was communication. As the ranger explained, there were no cell phones in those days, so you didn’t know where anyone was if you couldn’t see them. Custer became isolated and had to fight hundreds of Indians with only a handful of men. As we visited the battlefield, they had meticulously placed white markers where the soldiers fell and red markers where the Indians fell. There was a stone monument for soldiers and a very interesting memorial for the fallen Indians. There was much respect given to the Indians who were defending their way of life. What would we have done in similar circumstances?

General Custer's fallen position marker

Soldier's Memorial placard

Dave at the Indian Memorial

      We were getting low on gas, but our trip computer said that we had plenty of miles left before getting to Sheridan. None the less, we decided to play it smart by stopping a couple of exits down the road to get gas. There were 3 gas stations at the exit. We drove around the back of the first one where the diesel pump was only to find out that these pumps didn’t work. Then we drove across the street and pulled up to the diesel pump only to find out that they “didn’t get their shipment that day.” The 3^rd gas station was down the street, but there was road construction between us and the station, so we decided not to get gas. As we kept driving, the trip computer started doing an alarming thing: the miles to empty went down at an increasingly faster rate as we got closer to empty and as you would know it, there wasn’t a gas station in sight, just more empty land. The next exit with gas was in range of what the trip computer said we had, but it was going down at an alarming rate. When we got off the exit with 2 miles left on the trip computer, we found out that we had to drive through town first. I thought we’d never make it, but we did with 1 mile left! I filled the tank with 39 gallons. I thought I had a 36 gallon tank, but found that it was a 40 gallon tank. Whew! After that, we vowed not to trust the trip computer, but to get gas in plenty of time.

      We arrived at the RV Park in Buffalo where they “upgraded” us to the premium site, usually $80, for the cost of a regular site. The upgraded site had a fenced in area next to it with a hot tub, picnic table, and BBQ. It was getting late and needless to say, we didn’t even go into the fenced it area.