1200 Miles later!

3 states in one weekend! To the left you can see our weekend drive - we had a great 4th.
But hey, we skipped a week there. Wyoming was stunningly empty. I shouldn't be surprised - it's entire population could fit in one of Chicago's smaller suburbs, but that doesn't mean it didn't have it's charms. I saw at least a thousand miles of snow fence, which are huge wooden structures which have been placed at crazy angles to the interstate (depending on where the wind pushes the winter snows). That's novel, right? Gussie thought the landscape was gorgeous. I pointed out that it was very dry. She pointed out that I wasn't allowed to talk when sitting in the back seat.
Most shockingly, the JC Penny's "mother store" is located in Kemmerer Wyoming. If you were to see Kemmerer, you would be as shocked as I was. The Internet says the town has a population of 2,651, and sits on 7.5 square miles of dry, hilly land.
When Gussie and I first drove through town, we were charmed to the teeth. The place has dubbed itself "the fossil fish capital of the world" on account of the zillions of fossilized fish in the sourounding countryside (additionally there's Fossil Butte National Monument about 15 miles away) and had all the accompanying touristy fossil and bone shops you could want. Plus there were cafe's, coffee shops, all the cutesy yuppie stuff we like. However, when we actually got out and walked the town, we found most stores were either closed (I had to do without coffee for an hour), or staffed by the most horrifically rude people I've encountered. Now if you're from Kemmerer, I apologize. I'm basing my experience on only two direct encounters with two different shop-keep's. The fact that they were separated by 2 blocks may only be a coincidence (creepy).
Anyway, the JC Penny's mother store was funny in that it was extremely tiny, yet carried a small portion of the "typical" JC Penny's inventory. As an example, they had 4 t-shirt options for young adults. I think that was their entire t-shirt section. Having grown up being driven to JC Penny's every school year, I've walked into their stores and been absolutely devastated by the sheer number of choices for everything; 32 flavors of shirts, pants, swimming trunks, jock straps... It was almost refreshing to look at a Penny's, and in under a minute determine "there's absolutely nothing I want here". Easy.
We spent the 4th in Colorado and had a smashing time. Now we're back in Utah, in a town called St George. My brother commented (and I agreed) that he had no idea there was a St George, which shows what he and I know about churchy stuff. The internet says he was murdered (or martyred if you prefer) by a Roman Emperor named Diocletian for being Christian in the 3rd Century. If you ever see a biblical figure fighting a dragon on the back of a horse, it's probably him.
That's it for this week. As I haven't had much of a chance to check out the town I can't in good faith report on anything about it, other then the fact that it's extraordinarily hot (108F) and has at least one excellent sushi/thai restaurant (Benja Thai and Sushi).