I admit that we killed some time in Cheyenne this morning, and then again at the Lincoln monument this afternoon, but we thought we’d make it all the way across the state anyway.  

I have brought a bunch of books with me from Kubie’s store to try to sell at used book stores but we’ve been on the road so much the last couple days that we haven’t stopped to do anything.  Mark wanted to mail something through UPS, so we decided to venture into Cheyenne before we left the area; me to a used book store and him to the only UPS office listed.

Cheyenne is kind of a cute, quaint little town.

Driving through downtown in a 35′ RV hauling a pickup truck!

A mural

Mark dropped me off at the bookstore, and within minutes, my books had been rejected.  I had to wait for Mark to come back and get me and there were no other customers in the store, so the shop keeper and I had time to chat.  He used to manage large warehouses and he kept getting transferred around the country.  His last transfer was to Cheyenne.  After two years they wanted to transfer him again, but he liked Cheyenne and decided to stay and buy this bookstore.  That was ten years ago.  I asked him what he liked about it.  He said Cheyenne is safe with a low crime rate because everyone is packing guns.  There is a law against begging, so they call the police if anyone tries to panhandle.  There are no lines to wait for anything.  He said he has literally been in and out of the licensing office within sixty seconds.  And if he and his wife want to take in a Broadway show, Denver is only an hour and a half away.  My politics and his would not match, but he and Mark would have a lot in common.  When Mark came back to pick me up, he said the UPS office wasn’t open when he got there, so neither of us had much success.  Still, I learned something about Cheyenne.

Not long after we left Cheyenne, we began seeing snow on the sides of the road.

We even got into a little snow flurry.

The man at the bookstore had told me about an area of rock formations called Vedauwoo (Vee-da-voo) between Cheyenne and Laramie.  This is part of it.

Highway 80 is also called the Lincoln Highway. This is the only Lincoln memorial on the highway.

Even though I blogged about this place last spring, I have a friend who is seeing the country through my camera lens, so we stopped again.

This sign explains that the monument was built in less than a year.

What a view!  This is part of the Medicine Bow National Forest.

You can see how big the monument is in comparison to Mark.

Someone built a little snowman on a bench in front of Lincoln.

After we left the monument, we went down a 5% grade to get out of the mountains.

We got gas in Laramie. The town seemed to have boots everywhere.

West of Laramie, we got into a real snow storm.

Mark had to pull over to the side of the road to brush the snow and ice off his windshield with a broom so he could see.

It was at this point that I asked him how much longer it would be before we got on flat land and he looked at me and said, “We are on flat land!”  With all the snow, I had assumed we were still in the mountains.  It was a little nerve-wracking to say the least.

The snow finally stopped.

As we were approaching Rock Springs, Mark was thinking about pushing on toward Evanston…

I suggested we stop at Rock Springs and he said, “Why?  It’s still light out.”  I pointed out that the light he was seeing was just over the mountains, on its way to going behind them.  We stopped at a Walmart in Rock Springs, and in the time it took us to go in and ask the manager if we could park there (Yes, fortunately!), night fell.

The front of our RV with dirty ice all over it.

Mark is feeling a bit congested and he has a cough.  I got him some Mucinex at Walmart.  Please keep him in your prayers.