Medicine Bow

We got up at 8am, got dressed and headed out for home. We were planning on getting through a lot of Nebraska before dark. We got to Rawlins, Wyoming about 11 and stopped for breakfast. It is a neat little western town.

This is the downtown of Rawlins, Wyoming. They make good eggs here.

As we were driving through town looking for a cafe, we saw these 2 deer running right through town. I grabbed the camera and took this video. 

After a very good breakfast, we jumped back on highway 80 and resumed our trek. After about another 60 miles or so, we saw a sign saying there was a historical frontier fort location on the next exit so we took it. I am a sucker for historical stuff. It was Ft Steele and it was in operation from 1868 till 1886. It played an important role in the handling of Indian skirmishes during those times. 

Me looking at a place a fort used to be.

Ruins of a fort. It survived the Indians, but was burnt down in 1979 by some wild teenagers.

When we were just about to leave, Bonnie saw a lady groundskeeper working and went over to talk to her. She said if we were not in a hurry, to take highway 130 to Laramie instead of Interstate 80. She said the drive would be worth the extra time it took. We took off and when we hit the highway 130 exit we were unsure if we should......but we did it anyway...And it was spectacular!!! I hope these pictures do it some justice. We took about 150 pictures, I tried to pick out a few that would give some type of perspective of what we saw. The road goes south about 20 miles to Saratoga, another cool little town, which we walked around the downtown area and had a coke and some Ice cream. 

We had Ice cream in Saratoga.

The highway turns east after you go through the town and heads straight for the mountains. You start the accent and see some neat babbling mountain streams and as you get to about 9000 ft you start to see snow. at the summit we were at 11,000 ft and the views were unbelievable.

Me high on altitude sickness at about 8000 ft

The snow made me feel better around 9000 ft

I guess this flower only grows up here. Or something like that.

This spot is at 10,500 ft. It has a lake right around the corner.

Here is the lake. Bonnie is sitting in the water on a rock.

this is another lake called Mirror Lake. I wonder why they call it that?

Me on a glacier (I think) at the Summit. 11,000 ft above sea level. Our condo is 13 Ft above sea level.

I would highly recommend this area for anybody looking for a vacation spot. It is called Medicine Bow National Park. After getting through the park you descend rapidly (lots of brakes) into a little town called Centennial. They have a store called "The Friendly Store" right as you come into town. We had to stop, just to see if they really were friendly.

The World Famous Friendly Store

The store was really cool, but the girl working was not super friendly. I asked her if she was from there, and she said she was from Florida? I guess she was down on her luck and her parents had a place around here, so she was crashing at their place. Whatever....

The friendly store and the rest of town in our rear view mirror.

By then it was 5 in the afternoon and we were way behind schedule (again) so we rejoined I80 in Laramie and hauled ass to Cheyenne.
We did a bit of shopping in Cheyenne (Damn billboards) at some super outlet place. At 7pm we were off again. We made it to Sydney Nebraska. It is about 100 miles east of Cheyenne. We got a room at a motel called Sleep For Less. Seriously! Good nite.

Leaving Nevada...

We did not get good sleep last night, as it seems the place we stayed last night was a hang out for outlaws. We were awakened around midnight to the sounds of an argument coming from the room across the hall. They had the door opened as they were trying to get one of the 3 women and 4 kids husband to leave the room. It got quite heated and security finally came up and simmered the situation by forcing the drunk guy to leave. We were just about asleep again when we heard the sound of loud knocking. We jumped back up and looked through the peephole to witness several Elko police officers knocking on the door next to the last troublemakers room. We watched for half an hour while the police tried to get into the room, but nobody would answer the door. I went and laid down, so I do not know how they got them to open the door, but next thing I know there is a lot of yelling going on in the hallway. It lasted 30 minutes or so and ended with some arrests. Apparently there were several guys in that room and they had been involved in a bar fight downstairs that ended up busting some chairs in the bar, and it was all on surveillance video. We went back to sleep for an hour or so and were awakened again by some yelling in the hallway again.
The drunk guy was back and he wanted to see his wife. Some other guy was in the room and an altercation broke out somehow sending the drunk guy crashing into our locked door. Security came again and sent the drunk guy away, uttering lots of curse words as he left. Then we slept.....

We got up around 9, got dressed and were gone by 10. Goodbye wild west...yikes. We did stop by a second hand store on the way out of town. I was looking for a six shooter, but they did not have any on hand. We drove until we hit the border of Utah, and It was quite a sensory shock as we came over the last mountain in Nevada and saw the salt flats. It was strikingly white and different than what we were used to seeing. This picture really doesn't do it justice.

Coming over the last hill in Nevada.

Right over the border at the bottom was the exit for the Bonneville salt flat raceway, so we had to get off and check it out. It was only 4 miles off interstate 80.

There is the sign for the salt flats

Click on it if you want to read it

One of the race car drivers

That is actually salt...

We then continued east until we saw the Great Salt Lake, which surprisingly looked a lot like a big version of lake Mead in Nevada. We didn't take any pictures because we wanted to get to Salt Lake City and I thought we could see it from the city, however I was mistaken as you cannot. We toured the city for a couple of hours viewing the Mormon Temple and whatnot. 

One of the important Mormon Buildings

After leaving Salt Lake we stopped at Park City, which is just out of Salt Lake, and was home to the 2002 Winter Olympics. It was an absolutely beautiful town, We can see why they choose it as the location for the Olympics. 

Park City Ski Hill

That was the ski jumps used in the 02 Olympics

Bobsled or Luge track

We then took off to see how far we could get before dark. It was Rock Springs, Wyoming. We got a room at Elk Motel for 40 bucks.

Our palace for the evening

I will post a picture of the outside tomorrow as it was to dark to take one tonight.