Day 25

Day 25
Cheyenne, Wyoming

This day we rode about 100 miles from Wheatland to Cheyenne, and was our last night in Wyoming.

We stayed at Laramie County Community College in a huge gym with volleyball nets set up:


We played volleyball in there a bit at night. Also, they couldn't figure out how to shut the lights off so we slept wig all the lights on. There was a vending machine that was jammed so that you had to quickly grab one of the backed up drinks when you selected one. This worked once before we backed it up so much that you couldn't get anything out of it. It was somewhat entertaining. That day I bought a big jug of simply lemonade and a loaf of asiago cheese bread and ate it all.

Okay, so for lunch we went to the Wyoming Hereford Ranch where we had a sponsored lunch with the Lady Cowbells. They started out as the same organization as the cattlewomen, but when the cattlewomen changed to their new name the lady cowbells kept their original name. The food was pretty amazing, as expected, and the ranch was really cool. The WHR is the oldest continuously registered livestock operation. We ate in the sale barn (I think) where they would have auctions for livestock and livestock semen. The WHR once covered over 65000 acres and is world renowned for their white faced Hereford cattle. They mostly specialized in selling seed cattle that had very good traits and would be sold for lots of money to populate other ranches. I forget the correct term so I'm calling them seed cattle. The ranch had tons of history and some of the buildings had museum type displays set up for visitors. One of the barns the initials or name of every cowboy that ever came through the ranch carved into it's rafters. We didn't see that but we were told. The whole place was really cool because it gave me the feeling of what the old west was REALLY like, not just some tourist attraction.

Here are two old horses:


They used to work on the farm years ago. Their current owners asked the ranch to take them back for retirement, so WRH is keeping them until they die, letting them have an easy retirement at the place where they grew up. I thought that was cool.

Here is a stump that was carved into the distinctive Hereford head:


For dinner we had a friendship visit with the Arc of Laramie County. We had a picnic at a park under an awning. We played bocce and soccer. I met a man who had just recently gone to Washington D.C. and we talked for much of the visit.

I was talking to another man at the visit who must have been at least 35 or 40, and he told me about how in high school he had accidently been cut badly by a locker in a confrontation with a bully and had to be sent to the hospital. The next time he saw the bully he asked him why they couldn't just be friends instead of fighting, and I guess that got the bully to back off. It really struck me not only how nice this man was for wanting to forgive the bully and show him that it's easier to be friends than fight but how important it is to treat all people with respect, regardless of what disability they man have. It's been probably 20 years and this story is still fresh in this man's memory. I bet that bully has no idea how much this man thinks about being bullied in high school, probably the most memorable time of his life.

Anywho. I didn't really get those sentences out as clearly as I would have liked, but I'm trying to do this quickly.


- Posted from my iPhone