Cheyenne….am I still captivated….am I still charmed?

My love affair with the city of Cheyenne goes back to when I first visited it at about age 15. It was as close as I could get to my fantasies of the old west. At that time, Wyoming had only been a state for about 75 years. (Granted statehood July 10, 1890). Each time I returned….5 or 6 times over the next 40 years, I felt the same, charmed and captivated…and this time was no exception.

Oh things have changed, yes that’s for sure! There are things I don’t like, but I won’t talk about those here. The things I do like…

I can still find my way around ‘downtown’ without a map or the GPS.

The “Cheyenne Motel” is still there…which is where my (ex) husband and I stayed in 1971. When we signed in the guy behind the counter exclaimed “you’re from near DEtroit?! Bein’ out here you must be thinkin’ you died and went to heaven!”

The old train depot is still there…it’s remodeled and is a museum now, but it’s there.

“The Wrangler”, a big western clothing store, still sits there on the same corner, painted red.

Parking is still free…no parking meters, and there are still no lines painted on the street to park between!

The Capitol Building is totally accessible, (there’s a stop sign in front of it!) and I parked right across the street, under a tree. You can walk the grounds,climb the stairs and go inside and explore all three stories of the building, which still looks like it did long ago. It was modeled after the White House, so it’s quite beautiful. I walked right into the governors office and was greeted warmly. Not by the governor however. 🙂

Ok and the K-Mart that I shopped in back in 1971 is still there and I went to it…just because.

I took lots of pictures…I’ll try to get them posted soon.

This morning, September 16, we left Cheyenne to drive across the plains…it goes on and on…the windswept rolling countryside. There is so much space.

So Much Space.

This country is big. Vast.

I’ve thought over and over again about the settlers that came west on wagon trains, and what that must have been like for them. So many unknowns and so many dangers. Such risks they took! Did they truly understand that they were invading an occupied land? What would it be like today if the Europeans hadn’t felt the need to wipe out the native way of life as best they could?

What if we’d all just gotten along? Goodness knows, we had enough land to share…

We had enough space.