We continue with Karen’s narrative:
Before we did get through Nebraska, though, we stopped at a real nice gas station. They had a great big model teepee out away from the station on some grass. As our first souvenir, we bought a model teepee there. Also, they had a sale on teflon utensils which we decided to buy to use with our teflon pots and pans my mother gave us for a wedding present. Must make one more comment before we leave Nebraska. That is that we saw bales of hay stacked up in huge piles out in the open fields with tarpaulins pulled over them. They looked like whole wagon loads of hay. This we saw very often – almost every farm in Nebraska (or maybe it was Iowa) did this. It disturbed us. Maybe the farmers didn’t have enough barn space to store the bales. It was an unfamiliar sight anyway.
Wyoming makes you fell like you are really and truly going west. Not so in Iowa and Nebraska. They are more mid-western states. But in Wyoming we really felt like our destination of Salt Lake City might be near at hand. As we were getting into Wyoming – Cheyenne and Laramie, we noticed that there was a more scenic route through Snowy Range Pass and Medicine Bow National Forest just a little off of our Triple A routing. So we took it. And was it ever beautiful country in those mountains. They were 10,000 feet high. But the green of the trees and grass and the blue of the lakes and streams and the rolling valleys with pretty bits of yellow here and there was all very breathtaking. And we saw snow.
We made Jim stop so we could get out and touch the snow to see if it was for real! Also, we stopped at a beautiful lake called Mirror Lake and we oooohed and aaaahed for awhile. But the roads were steep and curvy and almost treacherous in some places. I was surely glad I wasn’t driving. In one area, they were putting in a new road so it was dusty and mostly one-way. But the scenery seemed worth it. We came to places that seemed like “no-Man’s land” with just a little store and a few houses clustered here and there. We never knew where that road was taking us next. Each turn was a new world it seemed. It was quite a long drive through this mountain range.
Dad