Cheyenne and Laramie Wyoming side trip

Last week while Jan and Luther were here, Patt and I had a couple days mini vacation  side trip to the north across the border into Wyoming to visit Cheyenne and Laramie.  Cheyenne is the capital and Laramie the home of the university.

Neither are large. Cheyenne's claim to fame is being home to Frontier Days which we plan to return to next week, the state house (seen in the distance) and home to Union Pacific Railroad.

Being home to the railroad means railroad museum and one of the largest steam engines ever built — nicknamed the Big Boy. That is Patt standing about midway along the engine. She is almost as tall as one of the wheels. This particular engine traveled nearly 500,000 miles going over the continental divide, retired in 1959.

The prairie is a bit flat on the drive between Fort Collins and the border, those are cows in the foreground and farm buildings in the distance and not much else anywhere except the "skies are not cloudy…."

 West of Cheyenne it starts to get hilly and a bit more interesting - still lots of cows.

And Laramie does have the old "Territorial Prison" of Wild West days that housed outlaws like Butch Cassidy and others.  An astounding 25% of the inmates escaped from this prison so Butch's escape (if he did so in the movie) was not a piece of movie magic.

 We stopped for a look at some of the wild flowers and such on the side of the road.

Not all of the roads we took on our route were paved.  We made a large circular route to head back to Colorado and this stretch was pretty cool.

and drove right through one of those herds of cattle.

 and drove along the edge of the Front Range back to Fort Collins.