Day 14: Nebraska to Wyoming

We are off across more farmland! You cannot help but feel positive about our nation, and even our world, when you spend 2 weeks driving through endless green farmland and ranches. You feel we are living in harmony with the earth, there is plenty of food for everyone and we will all survive. Life seems simple and basic.
Living in Southern California, you more have a sense of dread and doom. With its cookie-cutter strip malls and tract homes, there is a sense we are out of sync with the natural world and the only way to survive is to have lots of money. In the mid-West, you feel all you need is hard work and the proverbial 40 acres and a plow. I heard on the radio that a lot of farmers are on food stamps. Still, you think that the philosophical and physical rewards of living close to the land would make it better to be a poor farmer than an unemployed apartment renter in Los Angeles County. But maybe that's just romanticism.

Reestablishing my roots as a southern California consumer, I stop at Cabela's headquarters in Sidney, Nebraska. It is a huge and very nice complex. (see pic)<
They have a large grassy area for dogs to run and even kennels you can use for your dogs when you shop (a lot of Cabela fans are are hunters with hunting dogs). Winnie and I play fetch on the grass for a while and we share a McDonald's chicken salad. Because the kennels don't have locks (and I'm sure someone would love to steal my sweet Winn), I put Winnie's "therapy dog in training" vest on and we walk on in. It is an amazing place-almost like a museum of natural history with its displays of elk and deer in natural dioramas and the fish aquarium. I need some new boots and take advantage of the fact that here I can try them on before buying them (I've bought boots from Cabela's before and had to ship them back when they didn't fit). All the folks are very nice. Winnie does her tricks and is on her best behavior so it makes it easy to make friends. The store even has a little restaurant where you can get buffalo burgers and I think even elk or venison. Too bad I had my McDonald's salad already.

Back on the road and we make Wyoming. A lot more cattle ranches than farms. I stop in Laramie, Wyo and visit the Territorial Prison State Historic Site (see pics). <
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Butch Cassidy was in prison here for cattle rustling. I read that he was later pardoned by the governor with the promise that he would never return to Wyoming. As you perhaps recall, Butch Casssidy went on to even more fierce exploits and crimes and he likely returned to Wyoming as well. But such is the stuff movies are made of. It is late afternoon and a warm wind blows. I see the grass move in waves like the "sea of grass" Walk Whitman invoked for the title of his homage to America.<


I stay the night in Rock Springs, Wyo. The wind has given me an allergic fit. The hotel sells 5 kinds of pain reliever in the gift shop but nothing for allergies. I'm so tired, that after a bath, I sleep soundly anyhow.