Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

We are so entranced with Cody, WY, that we found ourselves looking at properties advertised in the window of a local realty office. What’s not to like? Low sales tax and low property taxes, no state income tax, gentle winters with three to six feet of snow, and views of mountains no matter what direction you look.

Cody is also home to amazing tourist attractions (which may or may not be a plus for local residents, outside of the income they produce). The four outstanding attractions are the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, the Cody Trolley Tour, the Old Trail Town, and the Buffalo Dam and Visitors’ Center. Before we depart in two days, we will have seen them all.

We spent most of today in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which is really six museums rolled into one admission price. It’s a good thing that the admission fee allows one to visit for two days, since information overload is a problem. I have no idea how one could see everything in one visit.

Today, we saw the Yellowstone exhibit, the Buffalo Bill Cody exhibit, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, and the largest firearms exhibit in the world. We studied Russells and Remingtons and Winchesters and Colts. Each had a hand in the West in very different ways.

Tomorrow, we’ll return to see the museum devoted to the Plains Indians and the sculpture garden outside where there are various sculptures of Bill Cody at various stages of his life. We also plan to visit the Old Trail Town (outside the Historical Center), a collection of twenty-six authentic frontier buildings that date to the late nineteenth century. Among them is a building from Butch Cassidy’s “Hole in the Wall” gang.

In between these excursions into the Old West, we’ll do laundry in our motel, eat the mandatory motel breakfast, acknowledge it is Sunday, and get ready to move on up the road to Hardin, MT, a primary entry to the Little Big Horn area. We want to see what happened to General George Armstrong Custer in that natural habitat.

At the same time, we’re most taken with Cody. It remains to be seen if we can find a condo here that suits our needs, but that doesn’t mean we won’t come back.