Month: June 2014

While in Cheyenne, we had lunch at the justly famous Luxury Diner.  Perfectly healthy and Nephew Brian the Vegan Approved … not!

and we visited the brand new Wyoming Supercomputer, which is the 15th most powerful computer in the world, and is used to research weather and climate change.  This is deeply ironic, because earlier this year the luddite (Republican) Wyoming legislature passed a law forbidding  the teaching of climate change.

Georgia, Paula and Marie worked long and hard to properly center the patches on my new leather motorcyle vest so that I could properly display the logo of our version of the Wild Hogs.

The results were worth the effort:

Leaving Cheyenne, I cruised home some 360 miles along the scenic route through Walden, Kremmling and Eagle.

Spring was good to southern Wyoming and northern Colorado; the prairie was emerald green, the streams were alternately bubbling and roaring, and the beaver dams bank full of water.   The sheep and cattle looked satisfied, and there were a lot of prairie dogs and bunny rabbits hopping back and forth on the roadway in front of me. A few of them had become roadkill.

I was startled on my ride up Gore Pass to be approached by five alien creatures who were dressed in head to foot in Lycra body suits, screaming downhill on their skateboards. One wore a complete Spiderman outfit, another a black Batman body suit … complete with winged helmet and cape.  I am glad they were young and sure of themselves, because the Lycra wouldn’t help much with road rash if they’d fallen.   It happened so quickly that I couldn’t stop and get out my phone for a picture…

The Ride the Rockies bike tour had passed this way a day before on a stretch from Steamboat Springs to Avon; the road from Toponas to Wolcott still bore the orange spray painted tour markings and warnings.

Terry and I spend a lot of time online looking for strange and unusual experiences along the American byways.  Yesterday, when Georgia drove from Rifle to visit her sister Paula in Cheyenne, I fired up my motorcycle and took the slow road, to Rawlins, Wyoming and then to Medicine Bow, Laramie and then to Cheyenne.

There were two Scenic Wonders along the route, according to our favorite online resource, Roadside America.  I left I-80 and took the old highway, US 30, to Medicine Bow, home of the Virginian Hotel which served up a tolerable ham (one thin slice) and vegetable (two slices of cabbage leaf) soup, and coffee.  Seven miles east, one comes across the

Fossil Museum

It appeared in one of Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoons as “the oldest cabin in the world” and “the building that walked.”    The cabin was built in 1932 to attract tourists to a fuel station, and was constructed of 5,796 fossilized dinosaur bones.

The owner died in 1947, and business fell off dramatically when I-80 was constructed to the south.  The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but that wasn’t enough to keep the tourists coming, and it was closed…but not abandoned.  A couple of security cameras still stand watch.  The only sound is the very occasional car driving by on US 30, and the ever present wind whistling though the prairie.

According to Wikipedia, the museum is for sale and somebody may move it to North Carolina.

Lincoln Highway

US 30 was the country’s first transcontinental road, completed over 100 years ago.  Its route ran from Times Square to San Francisco, and the highest point just outside of Laramie, is marked by a gigantic head of Abraham Lincoln on top of a stone spire, overlooking the roadway and the nearby memorial to the president of Packard Motor Car Company who spearheaded construction of the highway.  A loop of this highway ran through Colorado for a few years, but was discontinued in 1928.