Laramie

This blog has become something of a travel log lately.  That is ok.  It is my blog, it can be whatever it wants to be when I let it.

Over the long weekend that was the 4th of July holiday in this country, we visited my brother at his home in Laramie, Wyoming.  Craig has lived in Wyoming for almost five years, which is as long as we have lived in our own mountain home.  However, it takes about seven hours to drive from our house to his, and that drive ought not to be made in the winter time, or spring or fall when there might be winter weather, which pretty much rules out driving there any time except July and August for us wimps.  Ah, you ask, but why drive when you could fly?  Because when my brother has to travel by plane, he first drives 2.5 hours to Denver, and then leaves from the airport there.  And so if we flew, we would first have to drive one hour to our own airport, fly to Denver, and then drive 2.5 hours to Laramie.  By the time we arrived, we might as well have driven in the first place.  And so we did.

Driving across Wyoming on the interstate highway is a unique experience.  The state of Wyoming is truly lovely, but it is truly empty.  I found that I could only stand looking at the lovely emptiness for so long, and then I became very bored.  And Tim, who was driving, also was bored, and so he wouldn't let me read my book, but wanted to converse.  And there isn't much to converse about, miles and miles and miles across Wyoming.

One can converse about the weather.  Or the indications for potential weather in Wyoming.  About every 50 miles, there is a huge striped gate and a sign informing motorists that when the gate is closed, the interstate is closed.  The end.  Go home.  Apparently, these gates are closed often in the winter during storms, when the snow blows across the emptiness of Wyoming in raging blizzards.  Several of these gates are on the outskirts of towns.  In the event of a blizzard, one returns one's car to town and checks into a hotel room until the highway opens again.  However, there are towns only every 100 miles in Wyoming.  That means that several of these gates are in the middle of nowhere.  We had to ask ourselves what we would do if the road was closed 50 miles out from the nearest town?  Drive back?  Hunker down? Sometimes there was a lonely gas station out there.  Spend the night?

In July, the gates were wide open, allowing three truckers to pass through for every automobile.  But the very existence of the gates makes you wonder about life in Wyoming in February.

Anyway, after driving seven hours across the emptiness that is Wyoming, we finally finally reached Laramie.  Finally.  And to my surprise, after driving past the many trailer parks that pass for settlements in Wyoming, we found that Laramie is a very nice town.  It has a population of about 30,000, which makes the whole city about as big as my university.  It is also a university town.  The University of Wyoming has a very pretty campus, with many buildings constructed out of local stone, and tall pines growing between grassy areas around the buildings.  But the whole city is also nice, and seemed like a pleasant place to live in July.

It was fun to be in a small city on the 4th of July.  Laramie held a kind of town fair in one of the parks.  Many local businesses, churches, and other groups set up booths, and lots of them gave out free stuff.  We got free sandwiches, free water, free snow cones, free ice cream.  Free balloons from the local fire department.  Free crazy hair coloring from a local salon.  The kids stood in line to jump in a bounce house.  We all tried walking on stilts, and listening to local music.  The weather was perfect.  It was sunny and warm, but the temperature was no higher than 80 degrees.  Of course, the city lies at an elevation of over 7000 feet above sea level.  That altitude leads to raging blizzards and closed interstates in the winter.  But apparently it also leads to mild summers, with tall pines and green grass and seeds from the cottonwood trees blowing in the wind in July.

Thursday night we parked our lawn chairs at a nearby school and watched fireworks.  The kids ran around the darkened field while we waited.  The adults watched them until they faded into the darkness, but without any worries -- there were only a handful of families at the school field, and Craig seemed to know most of them.

On Friday we visited a couple of museums, showcasing dinosaur bones found in Wyoming, and native peoples and bison.  That evening, we took my brother's family to dinner at a restaurant that had been the Bucket of Blood Saloon back in Laramie's lawless days.  It is now a very lovely vegetarian restaurant (with a high rating on Trip Advisor).  Just outside, we watched freight trains rumble past.

On Saturday, we spent a couple of hours at the county fair grounds, watching a children's rodeo / horse show, right up until the time that the kids were bored and Tim started sneezing his nose off.  He is allergic to horses, but survived two whole hours before losing his nose.  Later that day, we drove 15 minutes east on the interstate and exited at a place called Vedauwoo.  This place, inside a national forest, consists of massive piles of granite, stacked into the sky.  (Photo from Wikipedia.)

You can hike around the granite and / or climb it.  The climbing was pure joy for the four kids, ages 5 through 10.  We scaled a tall lump of granite and looked out across all of Wyoming and saw ... grass and cows and mountains.  And that is about all there is in Wyoming, apparently.

In any case, we had a very nice time.  I have decided that I really like Laramie.  We will have to try to visit my brother again -- hopefully sometime before the next five years pass.  Hopefully in July or August again.  Because I don't want to know what the interstate looks like when those gates go down.