Midwest Roadtrip: Wyoming (and Nebraska)

As soon as Mark's cousin Don and his wife Christina saw that we were planning a roadtrip out their direction, they extended us the warm & generous offer of stopping to stay with them in Lander, WY. We were very happy to take them up on it.

Not only is their home on an honest-to-goodness cattle ranch, but Christina turned out to be a great cook, and their little girls are so adorable, I pretty much wanted to adopt them!

Besides just relaxing in their hospitality, on Day Three Don & family showed us a really cool local natural wonder. Located on the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River is a place where the water sinks underground into a limestone cavern and emerges in a pool a 1/4 mile down the canyon: Sinks Canyon State Park. We started at The Rise, where the kids were excited to feed the fish, and the view was beautiful.

Samuel checked out all the visitor information for us, and then we "hiked" over to The Sink.

The Sink was pretty amazing - a river flowing straight into the rock! They don't know everything about what happens to the water between here and The Rise, but scientists have figured out that more water goes in than comes out, and what does come out takes more than two hours (it took us about 5 minutes walking with toddlers).

The Mormon historic site of Martin's Cove is just east of Lander so naturally we spent a couple of hours there exploring the pioneer museums and recreations on Day Four.

We could have easily spent the rest of the day there, but that wouldn't have got us any closer to Iowa so we hit the highway for Nebraska over much protestation. (Basically we had to promise Samuel he would get to come back some day.)
We spotted antelope about 25 times throughout Wyoming, along with three groups of elk, several deer, a marmot (at The Rise), a wild rabbit (at Martin's Cove), and four wild turkeys. We caught back up with Highway 20 across northern Nebraska. Google told me that was the scenic route. And it really was, if you like simple green rolling hills.

Nebraska cattle definitely have lusher land to graze than Idaho and Wyoming cattle! We stopped in the town of Valentine at the end of Day Four and proceeded east on the even more rural Highway 12 the next morning, following first the Niobrara then the Missouri Rivers.

We had a late lunch in Sioux City and the continued straight east until we got to Laura & Aaron's home in Iowa Falls just in time for dinner.