= Goodbyes =

Morning came, and we had to say goodbye to those stragglers still around. We returned the foam swords to Ticia, since we couldn't really take swords on the plane ("But it's just PVC pipe inside!"), and we chatted with Stephen and Mia while they were waiting for their shuttle to come. After refilling the cooler with fresh ice, we were outta there.

= Wyoming =

As we approached the border, I caught sight of something on the top of a hill that looked like a buffalo. "Hey, it's a buffalo!" I joked. Leen said it was a tree, and she was probably right. But, no, it was a buffalo -- a buffalo-shaped thing that resembled a billboard, but didn't have anything on it, on either side. Guess it's one of those fun manmade landmarks that somebody puts up and immediately becomes the iconic symbol of the area.

Our goal for the day was to find a geocache somewhere in Wyoming. Leen's quest is to find a geocache in all 50 states. We hadn't even found one in Colorado yet, but there would be opportunities later.

She picked one that was an easy one just over the border, at this place that advertised 50 cent ice cream cones. 50 cent ice cream cones turned out to be tiny vanilla soft serve, which, ok, still isn't bad, but we weren't in the mood. The cache was a quick find, in stark contrast to the attempts we made trying to find a cache just over the border in West Virginia (from Kentucky), a couple weeks prior. We tramped around in overgrowth and poison ivy at four different cache sites before finally finding one on the fifth. It's the way it works sometimes.

After that, I expressed some interest in poking around in Cheyenne. For some reason Cheyenne has always been a place I wanted to visit -- no particular reason; it just seemed like a place that might be evocative of the Old West. I half expected it to be overrun with modern fast food joints, but actually it was not.

The city lies in the middle of nowhere. The surrounding countryside is composed of the vast, gorgeous amber plains sung about in "America, the Beautiful" -- but more of that to come.

Frequently, along the highways, there was no sign of civilization other than a fence or two along the highway, the occasional billboard, and maybe a barricades to stop snow drifts from reaching the road. Nice, wooden fence barricades, too, not the ugly orange plastic things we see up here sometimes.

And occasionally we'd pass by small villages, by which I mean, a smattering of houses grouped together as well as houses on double digit acre lots possibly can be. The only trees to be found were those clustered around the houses, obviously planted there deliberately for shade and privacy. I just couldn't get over how much of the land you could see around you at any given time. No matter where you were on those gently rolling hills, you had a 360 degree view for miles, rarely of anything but the open plains. It was such a stark contrast to anything you see in the eastern half of the country, and for a guy that watches a fair number of old westerns, it was surreal for it to truly hit home that, hey, that kind of land actually exists.

= Cheyenne =

Cheyenne is a cute little city. We saw the distinctive gold dome of the capitol building from the highway and, on a whim, I decided it might be fun to drive by it. So we pulled off the highway and found ourselves in a residential neighborhood more reminiscent of the suburbs than the city. It was a little dumpy at first, but then, a block or two later, suddenly changed into expensive looking places (but it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't expensive at all) with beautiful ivy climbing over many of the walls. The whole place was pretty quiet and empty. We did see cars driving around, and plenty parked in driveways, but they weren't all jammed together. Stranger, though, was the fact that the highways leading in and out of Cheyenne were utterly empty, even at the major intersection between the north/south and east/west interstates at the southwest corner of the city. I loved it. It just seemed like an incredibly peaceful place to be.

Not the usual thing you say about a state's capital city. But Cheyenne would just be considered a town in certain other areas of the country, like the California coast. The population is only 55,000 people, and actually it's smaller than that makes it sound, since there are literally no suburbs at all to inflate how populous it "seems" to be. It didn't seem to be as big as our own capital city of Concord, for example, although Concord technically has fewer people living within the city limits.

= The Old West Museum =

Except, maybe, for the last weekend in July. Our first stop in Cheyenne (after failing to reach the capitol when we turned the wrong way down an insufficiently marked one-way street -- good thing the streets were so uncrowded) was at the Old West Museum, on the northwest side of the city. Even the grounds of the museum were pleasant to walk around in -- green yards surrounded by bright flowers and interesting statues of cowboys and horses (and a giant cowboy boot with a spur you can actually spin around!).

Most of the museum, we discovered, is devoted to preserving the history of the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo, an annual event held since 1897 that's grown to become the world's biggest rodeo. The museum had a lot of equipment, gear, and photographs from the event over the years. The rest of the museum had all sorts of horse-drawn carriages, carts, and other vehicles that used to be used in and around Cheyenne at the turn of the century and before. Milk delivery carriages, ice trucks, all kinds of passenger vehicles, and so on. My favorite was the horse-drawn ambulance, a long, closed cart with a driver's seat up front, and a couple of seats inside along the edge, so there would be room for a stretcher.

One of the passenger carriages had a sign that invited people to climb up and sit in it, so we did. I guess the carriage is supposed to detect when people are sitting in it and made clop-clop noises, as if a horse were pulling you around, but those sounds didn't start up until we had gotten out.

After that, we spent some time in the gift shop and picked up a couple of T-shirts and packs of playing cards for my collection. Meanwhile, a troop of loud kids, apparently on a field trip, burst through the door. Our timing was flawless.

= The Capitol Building =

Once out of the museum, we made a second attempt to reach the capitol building. This time we were more successful, and I'm glad we made the effort. It's a beautiful building with fancy architecture, and it rests at the very end of a street intuitively named Capitol Street. So, if you were to drive down Capitol Street, the capitol building would rise majestically before you.

We snapped some pictures and headed out for food.

= Lunch =

Food was trickier to come by than you might think. Technically, we should have found a steakhouse or something like that, so we could enjoy the local cuisine -- we passed a couple of billboards advertising a "buffalo grill," for example -- but neither one of us were in the mood to take much time, so we looked around for a fast food place, preferably one we don't have in our area.

But as I say, there isn't anything outside of Cheyenne, and even in Cheyenne itself, the most we saw advertised were two or three of the ubiquitous and altogether uninteresting chains -- McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, that sort of stuff. Leen remembered seeing an ad for Arby's at the state line on the way up, but it turned out -- and I am not kidding -- that ad was for an Arby's that was 78 miles further up the highway.

So we ate at Burger King and weren't very thrilled with it, but, hey, you gotta eat.

= No Burrowing Owls =

There is a kind of owl that lives in the ground. They make their homes out of old prairie dog holes. Supposedly, you can see them sitting atop their holes, just like the prairie dogs do, even in the daytime, although I don't know if that's only at specific times of day.

Leen was interested in seeing them, but we'd forgotten to ask BG where they are usually spotted. So I called Dave at work, who gave me BG's number at work, and I rang her up on the cell phone. She told us that they're commonly seen around any of the prairie dog towns in the town of Nunn, a town off the Colorado highway to the east a ways, with pretty much nothing in it. She was right. There was nothing in it. This place was weird, a group of seemingly unoccupied buildings clustered together at a seemingly random location in the middle of the plain, centrally located to nothing at all. There was a watertower on the north side that said "WATCH NUNN GROW." Well, we watched, and lemme tell you, Nunn's growth is seriously stunted. I think we only ever saw two people the entire time we drove around the streets looking for prairie dog towns, and one of them we only saw because we went inside the post office to ask the clerk where the burrowing owls were.

She looked at us like we had eight eyes between the two of us, started to tell us in extremely vague terms where some of the prairie dog towns were, then finally just said, "They're all over!" Ok, admittedly it was a strange question to ask, but surely it's the one and only question every single non-local who ever visits Nunn asks, because there's just no reason to go there. As for the locals, I'm not convinced the buildings don't outnumber the people. I'm not convinced there are more than just the two we saw.

But she was right. The prairie dog towns were all over, despite that the one street we'd tried first didn't turn up anything. Everything else did. In the grid-like roads surrounding the one intersection with manmade structures on it, there were prairie dog towns every block or two. Alas, despite much searching with the binoculars, we never found any owls. This, unfortunately, is the life of a birdwatcher. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get unlucky. There are never any guarantees.

= Swetsville Zoo =

While on the phone with BG about the owls, she told us we had to go to the Swetsville Zoo. It was not a zoo, she said, but she wasn't going to tell us what it was, just that I'd love it. It was apparently just somebody's backyard, she said, where you go in, look around, and leave money in a donation box if you so desired. I knew Leen wouldn't want to go sightseeing in somebody's backyard, so I didn't tell her about that part. We later learned that when BG took Dave there, he had the same reaction. "This is somebody's backyard! I don't wanna go in somebody's backyard!"

So we pulled off the highway, and after some coaxing, Leen reluctantly drove into somebody's backyard and parked. Off to the side, there was an entrance to the yard with a big fancy sign over it, saying, "Swetsville Zoo - Entrance - Open." You walk in, and there's a circuitous route around the enclosure back there.

So what's the Swetsville Zoo? It's a zoo whose inhabitants, some couple hundred of them, are creatures made out of metal. Whoever puts these together has a delightfully bizarre brand of creativity. Huge metal dinosaurs tower above you, and little metal bugs and birds crawl around in the grass. One looked like the Loch Ness Monster, with coils of its body seemingly emerging from the ground in a few places. One display was a reptilian rock band, one holding a microphone, one holding a guitar, and a third banging away on a drum. Another bore an uncanny resemblance to Snoopy, World War I flying ace, seated in the cockpit of his doghouse.

The creatures are all seemingly constructed from scrap metal, most of it unrecognizable, although one of the best creatures was a Volkswagen body held up in the air by eight humongous spidery legs. Do a Google image search for "Swetsville Zoo," and you'll get the idea.

= Winding Down =

By that time, we were thoroughly exhausted and headed for Dave's place. We figured we'd eat before we got there, but nothing really appealed to us, so we ducked into a Dairy Queen down the road from Dave's place and bought some ice cream that was expensive, not very good, and served in tiny portions. Ah, there's nothing like a good expensive, not good, tiny ice cream.

We found Dave's place and pulled in. Dave was still at work, and BG was just leaving at that moment for a lesson, but she invited us in, told us to make ourselves at home, eat anything we could find, and she'd be back soon. We didn't eat anything (and some of the contents of the house, such as the furniture, were inedible, har har), but we made ourselves at home -- that is, we collapsed in the living room and didn't move very much.

Their sofa would now be our sofa, except that it wouldn't fit in our carry-on luggage.

By and by, Dave got home, and we watched him do is just-got-home routine -- flipping the air conditioning on, fetching the mail, etc. And before much longer, BG returned. We spent the rest of the day chatting and eating Domino's pizza, which is one of the best ways to spend an evening.