Up and at em! We
drove into Cheyenne to have a look around.
We went through the historic train museum, which is right next to the
working train station used by Union Pacific.
It was very interesting as the rail has been a very significant factor
in developing the American interior lands.
The steam engines, or “Iron Horses” grew in popularity and size as
demand required the services. Grew in fact
to be humongous engines known as “Big Boys”.
One on these was on display in a park nearby that we went to later. The
museum went through the history of the development of the rail and the interior
towns as they quickly grew to accommodate the people moving there. There was quite a lot of lawlessness and it
seems that there were vigilante groups set up to deal with this.
There was also a model rail set up above the museum
and this was done really well, depicting some of the actual towns that the rail
went through, with great attention to detail.
From the Rail Museum we walked to Capital Building, based on
the actual capital building in Washington, which had 24 crt gold leaf on the
dome.
Then onto the Wyoming State
museum. Here we looked at the history of
Wyoming, very interesting. After this we
picked up a Starbucks, Ros had a caramel crunch Frappuccino while Steve had a
chocolate cookie Frappuccino, very nice…. We like our Starbucks. We made our way to the original state Governor’s
House and had a look through. Was used
as the Governor’s residence up to the mid 1970’s. It then underwent a restoration project in
2005 and decorated it with items from different eras. Now they allow tours through it. Very interesting.
We walked back to the RV, had lunch and went over to the
park to see the “Big Boy” loco. My
goodness these things are huge! No wonder
they called them Big Boys. The Union
Pacific Railroad made 25 of these, toward the end of the steam era, at a cost of
1 million dollars each. This one (4004) was
retired from service after 440,545 miles in October 1958.
We then set sail, or steering wheel, to Laramie. A mere 1
hour to the West of Cheyenne.
Unfortunately there was quite a head wind blowing and we also had a slight
incline, so the ole girl was back to only about 50mph (the speed limit being 75mph). The incline took us from about 5500 feet to
around 8500 feet, back to what we were (roughly) in the Rockies. The plains beside the highway still had the remnants
of snow on the ground.
We arrived in Laramie and stopped at the Laramie Plains
Museum, which is in the historic Ivinson Mansion. We were quite lucky as the lady doing the
tours was just about to close up. She
had seen us parking the RV (no mean feat on a side street LOL) and asked if we
would be doing the tour. We said yes,
only if it wasn’t inconvenient. She was more
than happy to take us and it was fabulous and very interesting.
This mansion was built in 1893 by Edward
& Jane Ivinson. Edward was then
running to be the first Governor of Wyoming at the time and it was intended
that this would be the state house and the Laramie would be the state’s
capital. Unfortunately he lost and the
house became his private residence. Later on it was gifted to become a girl’s
school and was known as the Ivinson Girls School. It fell into disrepair and was saved from
demolition in 1972 and has since been fully restored using furniture and other
items of the time & from around the area.
It is a spectacular place that has extremely well restored. The inside is very beautiful and the house
has 3 upper levels with a basement used for wine & storage.
Having done the tour, we headed off to find a camp
site. We found our rest stop at a KOA
park ground, just on the outskirts of Laramie.
Time to have a dinner…. Sweet n sour-stir-fried pork…. Yum!
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