Ve-what? Vedeawoo (& Cheyenne)

Today we headed off to Cheyenne and of course we took a little detour through Vedeawoo (Ve-day-woo) National Recreation Area. This is a spectacular area east of Laramie where a layer of granite sits atop the normal soft sandstone in the area. This has created some very impressive terrain with boulder capped rolling mountains.


We started out on a very nice paved road but when we saw that one of the many dirt roads through the area took us back to I 80, well you can guess which way we went. The road was well maintained but the snow had drifted a couple of feet deep in many places, but due to Bill's expert driving skills we made it through. Cindi did check that we had the chains in the car.





The scenery was breathtaking, but taking pictures really took your breath away, litterally. It was about 25F and the sign on I 80 cautioned of wind gusts over 50 mph; wow was it ever cold. We really need to get back to this place in good weather; hiking heaven.







We saw our first wind farm of this trip just west of Cheyenne. It was pretty small with only twenty or thirty windmills, but they could've put a million windmills between Laramie and Cheyenne today and supplied all the electricity for the country. We heard that they also just approved another farm of 130 windmills for installation in '09 or '10.






We finally made it to Cheyenne, took a quick drive around the capital and had lunch down at the old restored train station which acts as the tourist info center. You could spend a couple of days seeing everything , but we had spent so much time in Vedeawoo that we had to choose so we went for the Wyoming State Museum. It's small but nice and was well worth the price (it's free). Overall our impression is that Cheyenne is another very nice, well maintained WY town. (So far in two trips we have only seen one WY town that we think would be unpleasant to live in. Rawlings, WY appeared to be a 'pure' cow-coal-and-oil town. Dusty streets and a lot of steel buildings. It is still well-maintained and nice for what it is, it's just pure utility.) By halfway through the museum, it was clear that Cindi had aquired my cold and she was fading fast, so we just headed back to Laramie.




This is the WY state capital building.









WY was a territory when it was the first jurisdiction to give women the right to vote in 1869 and Congress almost rejected their statehood because of this. They also had the first woman juror and first woman justice of the peace both in 1870 and first woman governor in 1924. This statue in front of the state capital is Esther Morris who was a primary proponent of the bill to allow women to vote.