Tracey:
So long Colorado, it’s been fun. We left town as the sun was rising over Grand Lake, then drove 90 minutes to Steamboat Springs, where we descended like a pack of ravenous wolves and gorged ourselves on breakfast at the Creekside Café - it’s good to be back in civilization! A chile you’d be relleno stuffed with asiago cheese plus hash browns and black beans all covered with a really spicy green chile stew, French toast with cinnamon cream cheese - these folks clearly understand that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Then we drove about a quarter of the way across Wyoming and two-thirds of the way up it and concluded that the cornfields of Kansas were a lot more exciting. Until we got fairly close to Jackson, the land stretched out as far as the eye could see in every direction, nothing but sagebrush. Every once in a while you’d see about 5 cows. Then twenty miles and perhaps there’d be another few cows. We had no idea it was so desolate. The ground is sandy, there are some dusty yellow flowers among the sage brush and the land is hilly in places, but mostly it’s empty and dry. There were towns here and there along the way - places like Eden, with a population of 200, which was so scary that it made Columbia, VA look good (if this is their idea of Eden, they really need to get out more).
We finally began seeing some pronghorn antelope and that livened things up a bit. Then blue mountains in the distance, a creek then a river, and all of sudden the true Eden was upon us. We’re spending the night in the Jackson Hole area - it’s too expensive to even bother going into the shops (just for fun I picked up the local real estate guide and the first page I flipped to featured at least six houses that were $7 million plus), but we found a great restaurant owned by three local chefs and treated ourselves to one more really good meal before heading off to a week of National Park adventures.
