Our drive through the plains and back into the Rockies went well (except for that Kimball Grade thing). There were plenty of wide open spaces, and we had ample road snacks, an absolute MUST for road trips.

We arrived at the Cheyenne RV Resort in mid-afternoon and had some time before dinner to take a walk-through of Cheyenne proper. We imagined it, as a prominent cowboy town, to have a charming and authentic downtown section that might also present us with an opportunity to sample the local ice cream. Huh.

Cheyenne is Wyoming’s largest city (population approximately 500,000) and its capitol. One would hope that would make for a good walking city tour, a chance to stretch our legs and treat our eyes and ears to something besides a striped stretch of asphalt. We parked close to the State House, figuring that might be a good epicenter for our quest. There is pitifully little content online about how to tour Cheyenne, and now we know why. First, we arrived at about 4:30PM, and the city rolls up its sidewalks promptly at 5. Second, when we asked a local for suggestions about finding some “historic features”, she thought long and hard and replied “there really isn’t anything other than a few buildings about a mile south”. We walked that mile south and did find a few buildings, but not something we would call interesting. Still, better than Deadwood.

About the most interesting thing we saw were large boot sculptures scattered around town, each commemorating some event or person.

To spice up this short post a bit, I have an update on how well our trailer has fared so far. Well, not so much the trailer itself, but the contents. On our transit from Coeur D’Alene Idaho to West Glacier Montana, a highway work crew had diverted traffic eastbound onto an offramp and back up the onramp so they could repair an overpass. I noticed a little late that the cars and trucks in front of me were not negotiating the bottom of the offramp too well, and discovered, at about 20 mph, that there was a pretty sizeable dip in the road. We hit that baby and nearly caught air! When we arrived at West Glacier, we noticed some broken Correlle plate fragments. 2 small dessert plates had jumped out of an overhead cabinet when the door opened and smashed to smithereens on the floor. The cabinet door closed all by itself. We swept it up, initially thinking it was a single plate, but as we opened and closed the sofa slide over the next few days, more shards kept appearing out from under it, thus leading us to count the remaining plates and arriving at the correct damage assessment. If this is all we suffer from bad roads, more power to us!

After our overnight, we’ll head south with our sights set on Carlsbad Caverns for Memorial Day. And here’s some good advice for planning walking tours.