'Sullen mounds' ... distant mountains offer cold comfort in vast Wyoming.
"You're a long ways from nowhere on a bicycle," said the old bloke at the gas station. "Oh it's all good fun," I joked back, my laughter sounding more like a braying donkey than the gleeful giggle of a female human being relishing the challenge of a 21-mile pedal along a freeway into a bone-crushing headwind.
With a population of only 500,000 it's unsurprising that signs of life are few and far between in Wyoming but it does make for rather laborious cycling. After indulging in a brief swoon this morning when faced with that wondrous phenomenon known as "fit cowboy waving at you from astride large horse against backdrop of Sierra Madre mountains" it was another 41 miles before I saw anything other than a flying ant and a road marker telling me the next town was another 41 miles away.
Unlike Kansas where the land is farmed and seems alive, in the southern part of Wyoming it is mainly desert scrub, great basins of sand surrounded by rather stroppy mountains; they look like rainbows in the morning sun but turn to sullen mounds when the clouds appear. It's all a bit Mad Max, with the Sinclair Oil Refinery a rather morbid sight along the way. The land seems to challenge you in a kind of "yeah, come on then if you think you're hard enough" sort of way. Clearly, based on the fact that I am typing this in the foetal position looking like Two-Face (remember kids, the sun may be behind the clouds but it can still burn you) I was not hard enough today.
But ever since developing a huge crush on Harrison Ford when I was 12 (he has a ranch here - natch) I've been aching to see Wyoming and, in its wild scope, it has so far lived up to expectations.
I stopped by the museum in Encampment, an original pioneer town, to nick a lollipop and learn that back in the early 1900s the town got part of its electricity from hydro-power. It doesn't anymore. Funny that. It also had two-storey outhouses - surely an invention designed for disaster?
I have to say though, and this goes for other states as well, when major towns are hundreds of miles apart it's unfortunate that small grocery stores don't as a rule stock fruit and veg. Store owners here say it's because people don't buy it and it all goes off - a classic chicken and egg situation. But I'm beginning to distrust store owners after one told me the best way to beat mosquitoes was to rub raw garlic on my skin.
Number of mozzie bites 36 and one gassed cowboy.
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