Saturday marked 2 weeks in Fort Collins; we celebrated with a day trip to Laramie, Wyoming, an hour from home.

Honestly, “day trip” is generous; I doubt we were in Laramie for an hour. The drive was the whole point; we spent 2-3 hours driving across beautiful Colorado and Wyoming as a snowstorm began to blow in. When we left Fort Collins it was 65°; at the Wyoming border, about 50°; by the time we left Laramie, 45°. I tried snapping a few photos of the mountains, the storm clouds, the rock formations, but I’m no Ansel Adams — everything comes out flat and bland.

There doesn’t seem to be much to Laramie. There is a pretty, historic downtown with a few shops, and a rail yard with a pedestrian bridge across it. I was thrilled to find bright, bold murals. (This photo of Dan with the mural of a tree on a bike is one of my favorite shots, maybe ever.) As we were checking out the artwork, we happened to notice a few mural artists hard at work painting one of the fish. I asked if they had created the entire fish mural — it spanned about a block — but apparently different artists were each assigned a fish. (On Gill Street, apparently. Ha!)

 

We passed a wall of real estate signs and I noticed a Bill Nye Avenue. Apparently there is an American humorist also named Bill Nye; this didn’t stop me from asking Dan to drive a mile across town to snap this photo.

On our way back through northern Colorado we stopped at the Abbey of St. Walburga. It is set in a valley; the rocky terrain reminded me of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Gorgeous and harsh. Dan is the king of unexpected waypoints.