Sunday, August 02, 2009

Day 48: Off day in Rawlins

We woke up feeling awful. We'd slept like rocks, but after getting in late and only having a McDonald's dinner, we weren't doing very well. We called Jillian's parents, who were able to arrange for us to spend the night in the Hampton Inn across the street. We'd just need to find a way to kill some time until check in.

We started by trying to take advantage of the free hotel breakfast. We found it to be sketchy days old pastries served out of kind of clean tupperware. Stomachs a little worse for wear, we packed out gear and left the hotel as quickly as possible.

We rode into town, a few miles down business route 30. As the library wasn't open, and the post office wasn't open, we found ourselves at Huckleberry's Espresso. Outside was a through-hiker on the Continental Divide Trail. We swapped stories for a while, each of us unable to imagine the journey the other was taking.

Inside Huckleberry's we had a real, delicious breakfast with real caffeinated beverages. I'd given up coffee in anticipation of this trip, and after over a month of not having any, it tasted fantastic. Since we only had the one computer, Jillian and I split up. She took the camera and went exploring town, while I stayed behind and worked on the blog (In fact, I wrote the entry for St Clairsville to Newark, almost exactly a month earlier).

Rawlins has a number of fun murals that you can check out at Jillian's entry. At the coffee shop I had a long conversation with one of the barista's children, which rather got in the way of me getting any real blogging done. Eventually Jillian returned, so we got Ice Cream and chatted with another family. The mom of that family had grown up in York, only half an hour from where Jillian had grown up.

Some time early in the afternoon we decided to explore the rest of Rawlins and check in to the Hampton Inn. We rode down to a little park by the train tracks for some fun pictures.

Then we went over to the prison, which we chose not to enter, in order to save some money. It was an impressive looking building, which housed a number of frontier inmates.

Across from the prison was the bike shop, which was unfortunately closed, leaving us to ride our booted bicycle another long day to Lander.

On the ride back to the Hampton, we noticed advertisements for a rodeo. We were in Wyoming, how could we not go to a rodeo?

Of course, once we were in the cloud that is the bed at the Hampton, we asked ourselves how we could possibly leave the bed to see the rodeo. But we went anyway.

The Rawlins Rodeo park was large, and full of trailers that people lived in at the rodeo. We were going to see a local "farmhand" rodeo - the big one wouldn't be until the next week.

We watched a number of local teams compete at a series of events, but mostly just felt bad for the calves they were catching and pretending to brand.

When the rodeo wrapped up, we walked to the end of the park and had dinner at Penny's Diner, which appeared to be an authentic 1950s silver diner. We were slightly disappointed to discover that it was actually a minor chain affiliated with Oak Tree Inn, but were not disappointed by the food, which was every bit as greasy and dinery as you'd expect out of a 50s diner.

At dark we retreated to the Hampton and watched some TV. I could have gone to sleep immediately, but on those beds I feel like you need to stay up for at least a little while, just to enjoy how comfortable they are.

| posted at: 02:20 | permanent link and comments

You can view more entries using the archive links to your left or by looking at our index!