Day 21, July 30: On to Denver

This will likely be a short post. We left Rock Rapids this morning and headed East on I-80. We made excellent time since the speed limit was 75 (as it is in most of the states out here) and the topography was surprisingly flat. The only really notable feature in the middle of Wyoming was out empty it was. When we started out in the West part of the state, there were ranches with cattle on them. When we got to the middle of the state, there were miles and miles of nothing but vast ranges of sage brush. Not a head of cattle, house or any other feature to break it up. It was a lot like the wheat fields we saw in Washington, but in this case, there were no crops. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) apparently manages a bunch of the land. There are also wild horse herds out there, but we did not (as far as we know) see any. We did see lots of Prong Horn Antelope along the way browsing in the sage brush. As we got closer to Laramie and Cheyenne, we started seeing large herds of cattle and even crop fields.

We drove into Cheyenne and stopped at the state capitol building. The building was open and we went in to look around. I was interested in the fact that the legislator was only in session for 40 days one year and 20 days the next year. The 20 day session is to deal with budget issues only. I told the information person our legislator was in session for 90 days every year which just means they can cause more trouble. The senate has 20 members and the house appears to have about twice that many.

Mary asked the state trooper in the capitol building where was a good place to eat. He recommended a place named Sanford's but couldn't remember exactly what street it was on. I think it one of those "I know how to get there, I just don't know where it is" situations. We drove around and found the place in the general area he directed us to. We parked (angle parking only, no meters) and went in. The place was something else. It was full of, well, I guess you would call it stuff. There were lots of pictures on the walls of sports people but there was also all sorts of stuff just scattered about hanging on the walls and from the ceiling. The tables were stainless steel, and each one had a roll of paper towels next to it. The menu was mostly sandwiches and burgers with an apparent emphasis on quantity. We all enjoyed the meal as much for the "decor" as the food (which was good).

From Cheyenne we headed south on I-25 toward Denver. Sheila wanted to stop in Longmont where some members of the Byrne family (Mary and Sheila's grandmother was a Byrne) were buried in the Mountain View Cemetery. We found the cemetery (actually the navigation system did) and arrived at 4:20 pm. Unfortunately, the administrative office closed at 4:00 pm. So, we were faced with searching an area about 2 blocks by 2 blocks with hundreds of graves for the ones the Byrnes were buried in. We began slowly driving around what appeared to be the older sections (the father died in 1933) looking for the Byrne name. We had covered just about the whole place and were on about the last lane when Sheila had me stop and back up. Sure enough, there it was! We all jumped out and took lots of pictures of the various markers and Sheila took down some information on one of them that might help her fill in some gaps in the genealogy she is working on. We were all amazed that we had actually found the graves as we really didn't have much hope for success when we started looking.

We arrived in Denver and found our hotel (downtown Hampton) around 6:00. It is such an understatement to say that the city has changed. We lived here in 1968 and came back in 1975 on a camping trip to the mountains. It had changed quite a bit in the 7 years between those visits, but now it has been 32 years since our last visit. The baseball stadium (Coors Field) is downtown (Denver didn't have a baseball team when we here before) and there are many more tall buildings. In a way it is kind of disorienting. The only things we found that were unchanged were the capitol building and the Catholic Cathedral. They have converted several blocks of 16th Street to a shopping mall. It is, in many ways, like any other shopping mall except that it is all along the street. There is not traffic on the street except shuttle buses that run continuously and stop at each corner. The buses are free and you just get on and off as you wish. Our objective was to find interesting shopping places for Sheila and a good brew pub for me. Since the place is like any suburban mall, Sheila pretty much struck out. However, we did find a brew pub that served up fairly good food and a reasonable menu of beers.

We rode the shuttle back to the area where our hotel is located, then walked over to the capitol. We got a few night pictures of the building (it has a gold dome) and walked up the stairs to where the markers show the altitude of one mile above sea level. We then walked back to our hotel to call it a day. Tomorrow we will explore some our (Mary and me) old haunts, look for some shopping places and maybe head down to Colorado Springs.