5 A Beetle Crawls Across America

This morning, I slept in and didn’t leave Rawlins, Wyoming until 0830. It’s Saturday evening as I write this. I traveled 600 miles today. I’m just a little more than half way. Some of the best scenery I’ll probably see on this entire trip was to the east of the continental divide just west of Laramie until a little before Cheyenne. What I don’t understand is that there was a sign announcing the continental divide, then 10 or 20 miles later there was another sign announcing it again. I wondered in what direction the rivers of the U.S. flow when they are between those two signs. The highway (still U.S. 80) is on a plateau about 5,000 feet high and there are peaks to the south (such as Elk Mountain-picture enclosed) that are more than 11,000 feet. They jut out of the high plateau, and, when you look farther south, you can see snow-capped peaks in Colorado. I’d definitely like to go back to Wyoming and Colorado and spend some time there. So many places to visit; so little time. Well, I guess I have a lot of time.

My cell phone worked for about 30 minutes in the Cheyenne area. Before that, the only place it worked this entire trip was for about an hour while I was driving through Salt Lake City. Now that I’m in Lincoln, Nebraska, it’s working again. I use Sprint. Let this be an advertisement for them. Man, Nebraska is wide. It seems to go on and on. The land sloped down out of Wyoming, and the bug and I drove past fairly boring land with many short plateaus that look like they may have been big hills at one time, but then the tops all got sliced off.

I drove along the Platte River, and past Ogallala where Gus McCrae’s true love, Clara Allen, ended up living with a rancher, and raising kids in the novel, Lonesome Dove. Gus and Call kept heading north with their cattle, but it looks like a lot of ranchers stayed put because I saw and smelled huge herds today (bigger than I’d ever seen before), hanging out behind ranch fences along the river.

Also in abundance are those flower farms irrigated by mile long circular watering systems (picture enclosed). The second most common question I used to get from passengers while flying across the country in the Super 80 was, “What are those crop circles all over the land below us?” The second most common question was, “When are we going to get there?” But that was from the flight attendants.

Well, not too exciting today, except for the seemingly nonstop attempt at maintaining control of the bug while, one by one, the eighteen wheelers would blow past me on the left, and their solid cushion of air tried to nudge me onto the shoulder.