Day 4 ( August 9):

     We left Estes Park at about 7:30 a.m. We drove out of the Colorado Rockies and into the Wyoming Plains, headed for Cheyenne. Tyler wanted to see the Cheyenne Depot Railroad Museum. When we got there we found that the museum itself was only a movie and pictures and a few artifacts. He had wanted to see the roundouse because it had some static displays of locomotives BUT the people who ran the roundhouse had gone on vacation this week...of all weeks. All of them...at the same time! Duh!

 We did get to see a “Big Boy” which is the biggest steam locomotive ever built. It is over 132 feet long and was used by Union Pacific Railroad to pull long trains from Cheyenne to Utah.

It was pretty cool to get to see this! It was huge. Tyler took pictures from every conceivable vantage point and I am not going to put them all on here but here are a couple of the better ones.

     We also visited a couple of antique stores and wandered around for awhile. Cheyenne is a pretty town with lots of trees and brick buildings downtown. We left there and drove across the rolling plains . The plains roll and dip and some of the higher hills are graced by huge windmills standing side by side above grass and sage. Many herds of cattle (mostly Angus and Angus-cross if appearances mean anything) dot the landscape. There are also horses grazing, as well. We did see pronghorns grazing not far fro the road. I think I got one good picture of them. They look somewhat like our whitetailed deer from a distance but have white on their bellies and up their sides a little and their horns are very dark and prong-like (hense the name:).

     Driving across the plains is not as boring as one might think because it is so unusual to us Ohioans. There are very few trees but the landscape itself is a sort of natural piece of art, where the green, rust, brown and gold swirl and dip, as if someone ran through it with his/her fingers. Every once in a while there were beautiful reddish sedimentary rock formations that a description cannot do justice. I think they were my very most favorite land formation, yet.

  In the distance we could see rain falling from the sky and the purplish mountains (later to look more brown) rising in the distance waiting there for us (even though we were already at 8,000 ft.). We had been worried about our little Honda and how it would do, but it just zipped right along through the ups and downs of traveling through the various terrains.

     We ate lunch in Rawlins, Wyoming and then headed across the Sweetwater Basin to Lander. The beautiful landscape continued but became drier the further north and west we went. We got to Lander at about 4:30 and set up camp just as a huge wind came up. It blew for awhile as a storm passed to the south of us...and I mean it BLEW! Dust everywhere!

  

We decided to go to have an early dinner and then rest before the stars came out (that was one of the big reasons I wanted to come out west...to see the stars in the huge sky they have out here). The owner of the campsite said you can even see the space station easily out here at night. We went to dinner at a great place called Gannett Grill. It was very good. We took a walk down the main street and back. It was a typical farm town with a few art galleries and restaurants here and there.




The movie theater was sort of like the Mayflower except it still had the marquee above it...pretty 1950s. We came back to rest before going stargazing. Looking forward to that.