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The Worst Wyoming Gets


Sumiki

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-----We've put around three thousand miles on the vehicle since its last oil change/tire rotation in Anchorage, and the intervening three thousand include the Tok Cut-Off, the Top of the World Highway, and the vicious hills and traffic in the state of Washington. We wouldn't be able to get back home without a last stop at a dealership, and luckily, one was about a mile from where we stayed in Bozeman. My dad returned about forty-five minutes after leaving and reported that somehow, the brakes were in exactly the same condition as they were in Anchorage, i.e. nearly completely intact. The tires, having been worn down through our travels, have reached their half-life, meaning that we'll be able to get home on them with no problem and tens of thousands of miles left after that.

 

-----Interstate 90 was again our route, and it was again surprising how familiar we were with it. Rain was again our companion for the first half of the journey, east to Billings before dropping south into Wyoming, but it stopped prior to our lunch in Sheridan at the Jimmy John's at which we ate last time. The gravel breaks came back again, this time as road work diverted traffic up and over an exit. We saw some pronghorn, but little in the way of other wildlife. Transitioning from the Rockies to the plains isn't a sudden flattening-out, but rather the rolling and meandering hills which we saw much of today.

 

-----Past Sheridan lay Buffalo, and past Buffalo lay over sixty miles of nothing. When you look on a map, there isn't a single settlement between Buffalo and Gillette. This was where 80 MPH on the roads actually made some sense—or it would have, if it weren't for the wind which gusted up to 40 MPH. The few exits were local ranch access routes where the posted speed limit was a rip-roaring 10. But it took less than an hour to make the trip and we made it to Gillette. The hotel, as we'd figured from our reservation snafu, is not well-run, but their rooms are new and clean ... even if we had to fix the clock so it'd be the right time.

 

-----Two years ago, we stayed here in Gillette and ate at a Mexican restaurant called Los Compadres. We remembered great salsa, huge portions, and tasty food, and this time we only got the first two. The fajitas had gristly meat steeped in standing oil, watery refried beans, barely-cooked tortillas, and utterly tasteless everything else. It's still the #1-ranked place in all of Gillette, which means that they either had an off night or have gone way downhill. It just was, and for their quasi-effort at a flavorful meal, I shudder to think of the product of whatever's ranked second to them.

 

-----(Side note: when we started on this journey, we fully expected our worst meals to be on the Alaska Highway for its captured audience, but as it turns out, our worst experiences by far have been our return journey, from the putridity of Haines to the "pizza" of Forks to whatever this was. There's a reason we're sticking to Jimmy John's a lot!)

 

-----Tomorrow: a return to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.

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