Interlude: Reindeer Herding – Aerial
Epic Road Trip ~ Wyoming
Crossing Wyoming – Time Lapse Sample
The six hours it takes to cross Wyoming will be the most treacherous of the whole trip.
Wyoming is the least populated state in the country. It also has fewer people per square mile than any state except Alaska, which is 7 times larger, and almost a third of which is above the Arctic Circle. Wyoming is pretty desolate. A hard place to live, with crazy extremes in temperature – a highest high of 114° down to a record low of -66°F, at places just 100 miles apart.
It’s a big, high, desert. Only Nevada and Utah get less rain. What rain does fall, lands in the mountains in the far northwest corner of the state. They strain the last bit of moisture from the air like a sieve. But for that rain in the mountains, Wyoming would be the driest state of all. Those mountains, however, are beautiful.
Epic Road Trip ~ Colorado
Front Range in morning light
It’s 11:32pm when Colorado finally rolls under the wheels, supplanting stubborn Kansas. Except, it’s really 10:32pm, because it’s now Mountain Time. We’ve been up for 17 hours, driving almost non-stop for 15 straight, and still have a long way to go.
Dash Cam
Epic Road Trip ~ Missouri & Kansas Video
Missouri then Kansas. The red lights you see in the dark are windmills.
Music by:
Peter Biedermann “Christiana”
Dredg “Brushstrok: An Elephant in the Delta Waves”
Epic Road Trip ~ Kansas
Kansas
Leaving the city of Kansas, which is in Missouri, lands us in the state of Kansas, which is not in Missouri. The weather improves immediately, as though meteorology obeys cartography, which follows geology, or at least topology, which all actually makes sense. The sky becomes blue again, and thus begins one of the longest and strangest passages of the whole trip.
Epic Road Trip ~ St. Louis & Missouri
With access to the hotel wifi, it’s now possible to do things like post to the blog and, oh right, check the weather, which reveals a new front moving up from the South in a big arc, carrying sleet and freezing rain. The forecast puts it shy of the due west highway by morning, like a wave approaching the shore, but just. If we leave early enough we can scoot past before it arrives. However, it effectively eliminates the optional Southern Route kept open as an escape hatch if the weather out west looks bad. Westward ho it is.
It starts snowing again at 2am (3am by my Virginia body clock). I know it is snowing because I’m still awake with road jitters. The forecast is apparently wrong. It snows all night. Day 2 begins after only three hours of sleep.
Epic Road Trip ~ Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois
Welcome to Kentucky
Across the Big Sandy, Kentucky greets us with an oil refinery. It’s a Dante-esque scene, with flames blazing from pipes that pierce the skyline, steam and smoke everywhere. An orange backdrop of the setting sun compounds the effect. Storage tanks up on the hill are blithely painted with a big “Welcome to” sign, which is bracketed with corporate logos of the refinery. But the human engineered landscape dissipates quickly. Kentucky assumes a fine bucolic appearance of gently rolling hills and forests for what’s left of the rest of the day.
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