Into the Wide Open

And so we continue our journey east into the Wild West. We are ultimately headed to Colorado, where we plan to meet Juliane’s friend Heather and her family near Fort Collins over the weekend.

We fill up our reserves at Albertson’s in Homedale, take a quick look at Juliane’s high school, Home of the Trojans, and head back to I-84 East which we enter at Caldwell, hops growing left and right of the road.

And then, we roll into the wide Idaho country, miles and miles through open land, past Twin Falls until we get to Rupert, a small country town, close to which we spend the night at Lake Walcott, right on the water.

We enter Utah the next day, stopping at Salt Lake on Antelope Island, float in the salty broth and play with millions of bright orange brine shrimps the size of mosquitos. We wonder what the settlers must have thought when they made their way up here, coming from the East, finally getting to water and then finding out that it’s just dead salty water.

A thought that sticks with us as we continue our journey further East, across wide open lands stretching left and right as far as the eye can see and beyond. We are surfing along the highway in Minnie Winnie at 75 miles an hour, but the settlers came with covered wagons. How long did it take them to overcome those distances?

As the day is coming to an end, we enter Wyoming with beautiful rock formations left and right, Some look like giant rock faces looking at us as we climb higher into the mountains. The sunset lays out a polychrome landscape in front of us and we can’t stop shooting pictures left and right out of Minnie Winnie’s cockpit.

After a long day of driving, we finally arrive in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where we set up camp for the night at the local KOA campground. As we pull in, it feels as though we would be arriving at a modern times corral with rows and rows of RVs instead of wagons. And the corral back then probably didn’t have a pool either and the settlers didn’t get a cookie per passenger when checking in.

Ahead of us lays one more day of long driving, Glen Haven near Fort Collings being our next destination. Another reunion with friends expects us, and we look forward to getting to another shelter for some time.