The Open Range

It's late Thursday night and Cristy and I just reached Denver. It was another full day of driving driving and driving...

We spent the morning in Salt Lake City learning all about Joseph Smith and the Mormons (see the picture below -- I never realized Smith was so tall). Anyway, we went to the church headquarters, a 32 acre campus right in the heart of SLC -- like Rome in Utah. It was an impressive sight -- from the temple to the grounds, everything was immaculate. Cristy and I went to one of the two visitor centers, the Joseph Smith building, the genealogy library, and the church art museum -- dodging evangelists the whole way. It was all pretty interesting, although a little creepy in a cult-ish way. We did solve the mystery of why Utah is the Beehive State, though -- Mormons used the beehive as a symbol of the Zion they were hoping to build where everyone worked cooperatively for the collective good.

I wonder what Brigham Young would say if he saw Salt Lake City today. It started as this independent Mormon colony and now is a (fairly) normal American city. And I wonder what it was like for the first 'gentiles' who moved to Salt Lake City. Where's their museum?

After the temple, we got out of SLC and went east to Park City, Utah for a great lunch at Red Rock Brewery. Park City was the site of all the skiing and snowboarding events for the Salt Lake Olympics and the place we had lunch had a view of the Olympic ski jump course and Olympic Village apartments. All very new and very nice. After collecting some provisions at Wal-Mart 1,868 (we have a Wal-Mart atlas), we hit the road bound for Wyoming.

And we got a lot of Wyoming -- 350 miles of it, almost due west to east. I was actually really surprised by the Wyoming landscape. It was very diverse -- mountains, deserts, plains, rivers. Nevada was all the same, Utah from the border to SLC was all the same, but Wyoming kept changing around every turn...

One thing Wyoming did not have was people, though. It was us, truckers, and cows for miles and miles -- the open range in every sense of the word. It made Nevada look crowded. There were also miles of wooden fences along the side of the road which I can only guess are designed to control snow somehow...

We stopped briefly in Rawlins, WY for gas and then left I-80 in Cheyenne (after nearly 1,100 miles along 80) , reaching Denver after dark. We're staying a little south of town in a nice Days Inn that's dirt cheap compared to the options we looked at downtown. Don't know what we'll be doing during the day tomorrow, but tomorrow night we will definitely be heading to Coors Field for a Rays Rockies game. I'm psyched -- it's Jamie Shields verse Rodrigo Lopez. And unlike the Salt Lake Bees game, there's no way we're missing this one!