Wednesday 28th 2004

From Rawlins (Key Motel) to Jeffrey City (J. C. Motel) - a distance of 66 miles. After shopping for breakfast in Rawlins - at a nearby supermarket, we phoned some dentists in Lander to fix up an appointment for Guy - Hooray! Guy's got an appointment. He now has an appointment to fix his painful tooth in Lander in a couple of days, at 8.30am in the morning. None-the-less, we still went to a dental practice to get some antibiotics, since the tooth is clearly infected in some way. After an X-ray, and 60 dollars lighter, antiobiotics were obtained. Finally we started cycling, rather late. As we cycled out of Rawlins, Guy was feeling a lot better! We sped on through a landscape of semi-desert, rocky thorny hills. Eventually reached Muddy Gap - a small gap in a range of dry hills, and were sad that there was a lack, these days, of mud. Got food at the little shop at Muddy Gap, then headed for Jeffrey City. A bit before Jeffrey City we saw Split Rock - a split in the range of low rocky hills that was an important place for wagon trains on the Oregon trail - and also important to the Pony Express - the romantic Pony Express turned out to have run for only about 18 months and to have been a financial disaster. Still romantic legends come from strange real events. Is this the same place that Mark Twain (in Roughing It) calls Devil's Gap? Sounds like the same place from the description.

Finally reached Jeffrey City, all 20 houses of it! It's tiny, having lost most of its population when the Uranium mining closed down, due (depending on who you ask) to either 1) 3 miles island nuclear catastrophe 2) the SALT treaty reducing the number of nuclear warheads or 3) the outsourcing of uranium for missiles in the US to Canada. The last, and sadly most cynical, sounds the most plausible. Anyway, c. 1983 the population of Jeffrey City fell by about 5000 as the mining jobs disappeared. After examining the mosquito infested grass that were the two possibilities for camping - and the associated lack of showers and toilets, we opted for the delightfully cheap and thoroughly comfortable J C Motel - just under 30 dollars for two people. We'd eaten at the nearby bar and cafe. The meal was unfortunately the familiar Wyoming saturated fat, with trans and hydrogenates, but it was tasty. Chatted to a man in the cafe about politics - staunch Republican - thought that the democrats were going away from the American ideal. We commented that perhaps that ideal had missed out the fraternity and egality sides of the American dream - perhaps that's where the democrats come in. He wasn't convinced. Wyoming is very Republican - to the extent that it appears to be a one party state!