August19th.
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| (c) Google |
Pueblo, which means village, sounds as though it might be a village, but in fact it’s amazingly cosmopolitan. I’m sure it’s overshadowed by its near neighbor (considering US distances anyway, it’s a near neighbor) Colorado Springs, but it had every hipster convenience, including a trendy coffee shop, which we set off for at about 7 in the morning. On the way, we found that cornering in the RV was much more difficult than it had been yesterday and was accompanied by the sort of noise that makes mechanics purse their lips, shake their heads and mentally imagine incoming cash flying in on doves' wings. We checked the tires and tire pressure and everything was fine. A cloud of flies gathered to watch; we soon found this was a thing in Pueblo.
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| man pulling sprinkler out of ground |
At Solar Roast Coffee we plugged in our phones and started, rather wearily, to check if this was a fault we could deal with ourselves or whether we’d have to phone in and wait for the cheery man from the company to come deal with it, which, since Pueblo may be a big city in attitude, it’s still hundreds of miles from Denver, could have been a long wait. Even an eclipse-missing wait. I can’t remember how I found it, but after sufficient coffee and google, I said, “Do you have the locking rear differential on? It’s supposed to be off, or it makes a funny noise.” After some googling, STB said, “Is that the icon that looks like you're supposed to use a sprinkler puller to pull a broken sprinkler out of the ground?” It turned out it was indeed that icon, and it was “on”, for no adequately explained reason. Perhaps a stray knee had hit it. After finishing the coffee and batting away the remaining flies, we switched the locking rear differential off and all was back to nominal. We hit the road.
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| Castle Rock |
The battlement-shaped butte of Castle Rock appeared beside the road. This, once home to the Arapaho and the Cheyenne, was an early Anglo settlement (1874) as it was the subject of a gold rush rumor. When people started prospecting, gold was in short supply but it was found to be an area rich in rhyolite. I have no idea what rhyolite is, so I’d make a lousy early settler of the west. It was here we started noticing that most places in rural America don’t have the most heartwarming names. We passed Hangman’s Gulch and over the next few days narrowly avoided plenty of Dead Man’s Creeks and Weallstarvedtodeath Mountains.
Our sole experience of the lovely Denver, Co. was an hour spent at the MacDonald’s in Lincoln Park. (Don’t nobody ever tell you we’re not highbrow.) This gave us a chance for a kip (British for a nap) and of course a goodly supply of coffee. (And gas from the station next door.) I've been to Denver airport many times before (see blogs passim) and Denver, Boulder and Aurora a few times. It's a lovely modern city but if I never went to the airport or saw its Devil Horse again, I'd be perfectly happy.
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| Cheyenne |
Cheyenne seemed a happening place, as busy as all get out and although to my coastal elite sensibilities it is the epitome of one of those cities in the middle of the country that by rights ought to feel left out of the main current of things, it didn’t seem to feel that way itself. It was bustling, and warm and open. It was lunchtime, so we went for a slap-up steak meal at Wyoming’s Rib and Chop House, Lincolnway, Cheyenne. This turned out to be a great idea. I had a giant steak that the menu called a Buffalo Steak. After I’d polished most of it off, STB asked for a bite of my ‘buffalo’ steak. I insisted was just the trade name for a very large cow steak, but I’m told it really was a buffalo, i.e. bison steak. It was tender and perhaps a little unusual but nothing screamed ‘not cow’ about it, as would, say, an alligator steak or an ostrich steak. Given the enormous amount of land in Wyoming, none of which had bison on it as far as we could detect, it might be an idea to grow some more of them. (Yes, I did give STB a bit to try.)
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| Cheyenne - high altitude light contrasts |
Next stop was the Cheyenne Depot Museum, which told the story of the Union Pacific Railroad. Once again, having grown up on Westerns, with their tales of train robberies, train-associated card sharks and those clever nozzles beside the tracks that get the water into the steam engines without them stopping, it was quite amazing to see that the railroad actually existed (still does; we saw plenty of freight traffic on it) and that some of the tales were true. There’s even one of those gigantic weighing scales that people piled freight on before boarding the train; you find out what it is as you’re standing on it. A lot of it was, frankly, the stuff trainspotters go to spot – the history of the giant locomotives, their numbers, how to recognize the type by the number of wheels, the various types of snowblowers (because as warm as it was that day, it gets down to arctic conditions at that elevation in the winter), the exact details of the repair sheds, Brian Somebody’s rail hat he donated to the museum and so on. But a lot of it was fascinating western history – the difference between Hobo, Tramp and Bum, the lives of the men who built the railroad (and then rebuilt it a few weeks later when it was discovered to be a bit wrong), the menu cards for Olde Tyme First Class travel during major holidays. (Although I’ve forgotten most of the menu, I specifically remember the Tongue Tart. It struck me as a very First Class thing to be faced with on your plate while trapped on a moving vehicle with no easy means of escape.)
The placards on the exhibits were fascinating. Each part of each description was informative and made sense but they were arranged in what I must suppose is aesthetic order. Many were in the wrong place, or aligned with the wrong picture, or were just odd, as though Bill Burroughs had been through them with cut-ups in mind.
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| Cheyenne rail museum entrance |
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| Cheyenne |
We also found a rock. Not knowing whether it was supposed to be moved on in some arcane geocaching way, we left it there. If it's your rock, Robert #719, this is where it got to.
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| Robert's #719, flower bed, Cheyenne |
Then we spent a more prosaic hour at Batteries Plus Bulbs, attempting to buy enough stored power to run the CPAP machine and other devices in the RV. It was an interesting place in itself – the more experienced floor walkers each had full-hand scars suggesting over-familiarity with refilling batteries with acid.
From Cheyenne we went through Laramie, also exceedingly famous to people weaned on cowboy serials. There was a lot less of town in it than I thought there would be. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised – it was mainly ranches in the TV serials – but after a lifetime watching a medium where two of the terms of art are literally ‘cut to the chase’, and ‘meanwhile, back at the ranch’, you’re conditioned to expect things with 1000 acres around each of them to be in some non-spacial sense close to each other. This turns out not to be the case.
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| Laramie, possibly |
Wyoming, of course, is where we wanted to be for the eclipse. We already were almost in the path of totality.
We drove rapidly northwest for about 3,000 hours to get to Rawlins, WY. The Walmart for some reason had “no overnight parking” signs up, so we went to the City Market where the nice manager said we could stay as long as we kept out of the way. Dazzled by the produce of a full supermarket after days on the road, we bought quite a few things to eat that we probably didn’t need. Ribs, empanadas, salads, loaf of bread, various items from the deli case… We parked up and then crossed increasingly darkening rattlesnake-filled gulches for at least 200 yards to get to the MacDonald’s so we could use their wifi. It was closed, but the wifi wasn’t.
By this time there were fewer Coke cans in the carton, but it was no less funny when they all fell out as I opened the fridge, and I made the joke about contents shifting in flight, anyway.
1 comment:
This is bringing back increasingly nostalgic memories of my own cross-country road-trip that passed through Colorado. If I'd known you were going through Pueblo, I'd have asked you to check whether the Rio Cafe was still there- http://kalidurga.blogspot.com/2005/05/route-50-road-trip-day-7-colorado-part.html
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