Out of Utah, Back to Nevada

Web and I have managed to have quite a few close encounters with animals on this road trip. The free range cattle and their calves were no exception, although they were skiddish:

And this one mooed at us! I mooed back. What a jerk.


I also took a picture of me, taking a picture in the desert before we got back to paved roads.


We got out of Utah soon after and stopped later as a small town in Nevada. Apparently there might we a problem with meth in Nevada, looking at the PSAs.


We stopped for coffee at this place Bella's, it apparently used to be a strip club. Now they serve espresso and giant cinnamon rolls.

Utah Part II: The Search for Art in the Middle of Nowhere

On Thursday, June 4th, we headed out from West Wendover, NV back into Utah on a truly obscure excursion: the search for Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973-1976). I first heard about the Sun Tunnels in an art history Western art survey course my freshman year of college. The last time I studied them though was the Fall semester of my senior year where we looked at them more in-depth, and also that whole Earthworks thing. So when I foound out the route from Denver to San Francisco required passage through Utah, I figured, why not go see this monument in the middle of nowhere, Utah? This is really only something someone with significant interest in art would ever want to do.

The Sun Tunnels really are in the middle of nowhere. Google maps doesn't even recognize much of the last part of the journey to them as on roads. The nearest humans are about 20 miles away. And the "town" that the tunnels are southeast of isn't actually a town at all, but a historical marker called Lucin. If you thought you have been to the middle of nowhere, chances are you haven't been on the dirt roads of Utah deep into the desert basin:

(This is still about 10 miles away from nowhere!)

On our way to the middle of nowehere we encountered a dust devil, which is the little twirling cloud of dust to the right of this road:

And it went right past us!

We also past some truly free-range cattle. These guys have no fences, and I don't think they had seen people in a long while, since they seemed a little spooked by us, aka, they actually looked up from grazing to check us out.

Open Skies and Rawlins, WY, Part I

Between the Lincoln Monument and Utah, there was a lot of open spaces and Rawlins, WY.

And don't forget a ton of cattle, even more than in Nebraska or Colorado:


And the Rocky Mountains:


And clouds:


Wyoming has strange PSAs against secondhand smoke:


And more wind turbines than anywhere we've ever seen. There was at least 100 in one patch alone.

However, even though Wyoming has a lot of wind power, they also have some crazy fossil fuel burning going on:

After awhile we reached Rawlins, WY. A small city where there is cheap gas, buffalo burgers, and a state penitentiary.

Before checking out the jail and getting gas, we got lunch at a local diner called Sharp Shooters, where the hostess is a Rawlins native. And this diner was adorable and fit for any old time cowboy or cowgirl. They had a buffalo head on the wall:

A carved wooden cowboy and the diner rules. Wyoming actually doesn't have a Clean Air Act, so they have both a smoking and non-smoking section. Old school.



The salad buffet is a cover wagon!


And the most adorable bathroom room signage ever:

Their barbecue, buffalo burgers, and coleslaw, also were pretty darn good.

The Colors of Colorado

So camping in Nebraska could have been more pleasant. One, our campsite was covered in tiny little anthills. Two, it rained all night and we woke up with everything around us soggy. Bleh.

Also, the so called wi-fi internet didn't work, so I didn't blog. So we got up, showered, and hit the road for Denver.

When we entered Colorado, our surroundings almost instantaneously became more aesthetically pleasing with rolling hills, a brownish colored road, and a more mixed bunch of vegetation... of many colors.

Colorado also has a lot of hamburgers on legs grazing the plains:


And more cows:


One of my childhood memories of Colorado, since when I was little we had lived in Colorado Springs and Ft. Collins for a little while, is flavored and colored popcorn. So at one of our stops for gas I purchases rainbow popcorn. It made me happy.


And soon, we were in Denver, the Mile High City:


And our first destination in Denver: Beau Jo's Pizza, the best pizza on Earth! Another one of my favorite childhood memories is the delicious honey wheat crust of a cheesy, garlicky, mountain pie. In my family, a Beau Jo's mountain pie might as well be a symbol of our love for one another. But we topped our pizza with artichoke hearts, onions, mushrooms, feta cheese... yummy! We were so hungry though we forgot to take a picture. Oh well, at least Web is a believer now:

After our mountain pie, we headed into downtown. Web hasn't ever been to Denver so I camped out in a hotel lobby to work on some blogging while he explored downtown. He bought sneakers at Payless and didn't take any pictures of downtown, despite having the camera. Pft.

We hung out for awhile and relaxed, but there it was time to go to the Buckhorn Exchange for dinner. The Buckhorn Exchange is another wonder I remembered from the Travel Channel. Buckhorn is the oldest restaurant in Denver, it serves a variety of gourmet and exotic meat, and its decor lets you know you are in Cowboy Country!

Most of the really crazy meats were in the appetizers, so we had to get those. I ordered fried alligator:

Alligator tastes really weird. It is like a chewier chicken, but tastes like it should be swampy seafood. And has a really potent aftertaste. It was really weird, but made me feel at the top of the food chain.

But that wasn't the only weird thing we ordered. Web was brave enough to order Rocky Mountain oysters, aka bull fries, aka fried bull testicles. Here is Web chowing down on some cow manhood:



I tried some too. Bull fries are the ultimate proof that anything fried tastes good, because they weren't bad at all, considering what they were. Kinda like sliced and fried mushrooms... but of a testicular origin.

For our meals we grubbed on elk, quail, cornish game hen, and duck. We might have felt mildly guilty eating our friendly elks if the steak hadn't been grilled to perfection. I found out that cornish game hen tastes exactly like chicken. And Web's new favorite poultry are tender little quails.

After eating more species of animals I thought was possible in one meal, we headed over to our friend Tate's apartment for our lodging. Tate actually let us just borrow the whole studio which was sweet. I also had the pleasure of meeting Knives, his cat who like to bat at my feet when I was trying to sleep.

Into the Boring Part of Nebraska

So after our close encounters of the antelope kind, Web and I got back on I-80 and headed into the boring part of Nebraska.

The only thing of interest between Lincoln and the Colorado state line is Kearney. Kearney is home to the Great Platte River Road Archway. A colorful and random monument over the interstate. Unfortunately we missed out on going inside, where there is apparently an education museum of sorts.


In Kearney, the last big city until our camping site in Gothenburg, we decided to pull off and look for some food. Web had never been to Culver's, which is known for its butterburgers and frozen custard. The first time I had Culver's was actually last year on a road trip back from the RNC in St. Paul, MN with Andre (a Midwest native).
Culver's was yummy, but the Georgia Peach custard shake didn't sit well with my newly-recognized lack of lactase production. So, we went to Target anyways to get Web swim trunks, and I bought lactase pills to relieve the feeling that my stomach was going to explode. They work amazingly well!

The smell of Nebraska also gets progressively worse the more cows you see. And there were a lot of cows...