Wyoming around

Sheridan, Wyoming — 1096.8 miles

Let's hear it for fossil fuels.

I've never seen so many trains in my life, and while some of them are hauling farm implements on flatcars, or boxcars full of grain, most of what I've seen has been hoppers of coal. And since US 26, my route out of Nebraska, runs parallel to the tracks, I got to see plenty of them on the way. (Back home, of course, the predominant fuel for power plants is natural gas, and some of us actually pay for that renewable wind stuff, but out here, if coal isn't king, it's at least the ten of clubs.)

Wyoming is remarkable, anyway: it's quite a bit larger than Oklahoma, but has fewer people than Oklahoma City. And it's almost the same shape as its license plates. (As is Colorado, but let that pass.) Towns tend to be few and far between, which explains much why I paid two bucks a gallon for 88 octane in the hamlet of Kaycee, a long way from Jay Em and indeed a long way from anywhere, but a spiffy sort of place if you have any peripheral interest in the Old West.

Sheridan, of course, positions itself as a tourist trap, but besides its gateway status, it has lots of neat stuff, including an actual Bucky Fuller-style geodesic dome, not unlike (but in better shape than) the one along 23rd Street in Oklahoma City. And for those of us who get entirely too much thrill sliding along two-lane roads barely glued to the mountainside, there's US 14 to the east.

An actual case of too much thrill came on I-90 earlier, though: a bit of dicing among two pickups, two eighteen-wheelers, and yours truly, trying to make enough holes for everyone at 85 mph, when up comes the reason for the bottleneck. It was a pickup from a beer distributor, hazards flashing, doing 45 at the outside, and as I passed too close I found out why: the Fates, a passing truck, or incredible bad luck had dropped something into the windshield heavy enough to have turned it into glass fabric, with barely enough adhesion left to keep it from blowing into the poor fellow's face. Rule One under these conditions, of course, is "Get away from the hazard," so I sped up and disappeared into the distance. Those of you who know my car know that it's a modest little sedan with an engine displacing a mere 1991 cubic centimeters; if you're curious, second gear at 87 mph does not reach redline.

(Hmmm. Maybe I should have called this "Two Liters Across America.")

Posted at 4:49 PM to World Tour '04