Welcome to Windy Wyoming

Posted 2 years ago by Mike

We spent the past week at Curt Gowdy State Park which is located in between Cheyenne and Laramie Wyoming. Beautiful, scenic, majestic, lots of wildlife, but wow is it windy 🙂 Cheyenne is the 4th most windy city in the United States. Just outside of town up in the foothills is a massive wind farm.

On our first day, we explored the state capital of Wyoming — Cheyenne. A small town but it has one of the most beautiful and extravagant botanical gardens I have ever seen. Indoor and outdoor gardens. And it is free. I like free 🙂 The state capital building is also worth checking out. They did a great job restoring its beauty during a major, recent restoration project. To complete our day, we visited the Wyoming State Museum.

The state park which is our home for the week has a nice reservoir for boating and kayaking — Granite Springs Reservoir. It’s nice to not even have to leave camp to enjoy a relaxing paddle day. Luckily, we found a day where the wind stopped to hit up the lake.

We have begun the process for applying for the D7 Portuguese Visa in order to become permanent residents of Portugal. One of the requirements is an FBI background check. We took a day trip to Fort Collins, Colorado in order to get fingerprinted and request the background check. While in Fort Collins, we couldn’t pass up an opportunity to visit the famous New Belgium Brewery. Well at least famous to me 🙂 I’ve always been a fan of their beer. The brewery is crazy big. They have a huge beer garden and lawn and even a stage for live music. We received a free bottle of Fat Tire — their flagship brew. Really fun spot.

We spent a day in Laramie, another cool, small country town. The University of Wyoming is located in Laramie — the campus is beautiful! We rode our bikes along the Laramie River Greenway, all over town, and around the university campus. A great day for a bike ride 🙂 It was nice to just cruise around residential streets with little to no traffic. We had quite the self-guided tour of Laramie. I really enjoyed the historic buildings on campus and walkways lined with towering oak trees probably planted when the university was built. We had to detour on the Greenway because the Laramie River is at flood levels and part of the bike path was under water — not just a little water, probably 4-5 feet deep — yikes!! Besides that, a wonderful day in Laramie.

Curt Gowdy State Park is loaded with outdoor recreation — hiking trails, mountain bike trails, the lake, etc. We hiked from camp along the trail to Hidden Falls. The trail mostly runs along Crow Creek which is running pretty good this time of year. Some interesting rock formations too.

Our last full day in the Laramie area, we had to hit up Medicine Bow National Forest. We hiked the trails in the Happy Jack area. Part of the trail was the Old Happy Jack Road — an old wagon trail that was one of the original routes into Cheyenne during the late 1800’s. We also hiked past marshes with beaver dams and beaver huts. Moose like to hang out there but no moose today. Stretches of dense forest of pine and aspen provided some nice shade. And open meadows with wildflowers and pine-covered hillsides in the background made for a super scenic day on the trail.

Living in an RV is fun and overall I think the pro’s outweigh the con’s. But it is definitely not all glamorous 🙂 Case in point — we thought we would have water and power hookup here at the state park. Nope, just power. So we had to go 7 nights on 32 gallons of fresh water. We made it but I had to add 1-2 gallons extra per day to get us by. And we nearly filled our black tank so had to use the park’s bathrooms the last couple days to play it safe.

That’s it for Cheyenne/Laramie…next stop Lander, WY and the Wind River Range — the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming 🙂