Tuesday - Denver and Wyoming

Hello out there,
Judy, Ruth and I have commenced our trip West. We left Stamford in the light rain at 5:30 this morning, flew Frontier Air with a bighorn sheep on our plane's tail to Denver, CO. There we picked up our rental car and popcorn! After deciding to move up to a mid-size - a silver Ohio plated 2011 Toyota Corolla - for more power & trunk room, we headed north on 470 to I-25 to Cheyenne, Wyoming and then headed west on I-80 with overcast skies and intermittent rain. We stopped in Laramie, WY for a late lunch at the Village Inn - great pies. As we continued west we were hit sometimes blinding rain west across Wyoming to Rawlings where we headed NW on scenic route - 287/879N to Lander, Wyoming. (Altitude 5355 feet)
Mileage today: 346

The Wyoming scenery is beyond spectacular: the rocky outcrops with vivid thrusts of the rock showing all the stratifacations of the granite, limestone and sandstone, the incredible play of light and shadow on the land under the multilayered clouds -  some are ethereal and as whispy as cotton candy, others great billowing dark thunderheads.  The lighting was beautiful and we even had a rainbow. The land is vast and desolate - it is easy to see why Wyoming only has a population density of 5.8 people/square mile. This is wide open, windy, gorgeous land that demands the most of the hardy people who live here.  It is sparsely peopled, and we saw occasional herds of predominately Black Angus cattle, numerous horses, a buffalo ranch, 2 camels!!!, and several small herds of antelope.
There are large wind farms, oil rigs, immense water sprinklers, great snow fences

 We've been logging the license plates we've seen - mostly before we took 287/289. So far we  have 15 states and Chihuahua, Mexico: our own Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Oklahoma (Many of the trucks are from OK), Idaho, Texas, Tennessee, Nebraska, California, Virginia, Oregon, Nevada, Maine, Utah and Montana.

Billboards proclaim along the highway proclaim Buford, WY, Pop. 1, the smallest town with a zip code.
Must get to bed, Been up 21 hours.