So. You've decided to come along!
We journeyed across the desert basin of southern Wyoming. I was amazed and somewhat horrified as I thought of what the settlers that pushed across this territory must have experienced. I kept murmuring to Kevin about it as we would crest a rise and see nothing but wastelands in front of us. Maps were unbelievably deceiving: the dot that would have indicated a small town of a few thousand in Illinois would be a dusty trio of beaten mobile homes. The lack of water and the constant brutality of the sun must have been the simple elements of despair for many people. Yet they came. And past mobile homes, wind farms, an oil refinery and seemingly-infinite stretches of barbed wire, we went also.
Eventually we turned north and began to notice that we were out of the hazy air of the fires and that we were venturing back into areas where life was more apparent. The land grew more fertile as we moved along the underside of the Wind River Mountains. You can see the clear light of that land here in this picture. As we heard later, on the other side, in the reservations, the fires continued to rage....
After untangling ourselves from the "authentic Old West" decor of the downtown strip, we found ourselves outside the unassuming little lump of a restaurant known as Nani's. Here we were treated to an exceptional Italian evening, from a restaurant specializing in the regional menus of Italy, determined to prove that "Italian" is not a "singular" concept. From their "Sardegna" menu we consumed the following treasures. I tried the Bistecchine di Cinghiale ($ 19.50 L. 41.750--I actually had lire on me...) which was described as "wild boar chops in a dark, sweet and sour sauce with Sultana raisins, prunes, pancetta and a touch of bitter chocolate and aromatic spices served with potatoes." The sauce incredibly rich and quite unlike anything I'd ever had before. Kevin contented himself with Pasta con Burro e Parmigiano ($ 10.00) "a heaping bowl of pasta with sweet butter and lots of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese." We baptized all of this with a bottle of Villa Antinori Chianti Classico Reserva ($ 31.00) and with continuing talk about women, the past, the food and the sights we'd seen so far, this rated as a particularly fine evening.
As we sat on the mountaintop, looking mostly at the valley on the other side of the mountain, undeveloped and seemingly untouched, we had one of our best "slow" times of the trip. When you are going to cover 3500 miles in nine days, with plenty of social stops along the way, you just don't have a lot of time to sit. But we did manage to squeeze this in. Without any need to ski or hike down the mountainside, you had the rare luxury of just being able to enjoy a particular place for itself, rather than it being so much of just one place on your journey to another place.
Tired? But there's still miles to go....