Home Again Indeed, Road Trip Day 12 and 13

 Rock Springs and Rawlins WY to Sydney, NE

Days 11, 12, and 13 were primarily driving days that can be depicted as mountains to  the Salt Lake Desert, then mountains, then the plains of Nebraska, on and on for hours and hours. Paul drove. I finished listening to Cather's One of Ours.

We did nothing in Cold Springs except sleep, get up and head out to get to Rawlins in order to get the Wyoming Pioneer Prison tour. A whole staff of young people showed up, jazzed from having joined several crews in cleaning up downtown Rawlins that morning.

 

Our tour guide, Lauren, recited a prison's story  typical of others at Alcatraz, Eastern Penitentiary, and the Wyoming Territorial Prison: tales of the good and the bad: of the baseball team that was tops till their star player was executed for murder. (His name was Seng, and his crime sounds very contemporary: he murdered his boss to revenge him for his firing.) We learned of executions and escapes, lockdowns and lockups. So much remains the same, terms like "fish" and weapons called "shanks" made of pens, toothbrushes, and worse. 

Shanks

The usual extracurriculars of crafts and art (lots of murals), writing, schooling, and music, lots of bands.

We got the story of Annie Bruce, the "woman" (age 14) who went to prison for murdering her father with a poisoned pie. Relatives believe her mother was the real culprit. She eventually got her sprung, and she went on to be married, have kids and live to 86.

I bought a book by one of the inmates titled The Sweet Smell of Sagebrush which has some lovely phrases but otherwise is unreadable. . I should have bought the Annie Bruce t-shirt.

DOWNTOWN RAWLINS

Sandra Dent

Told the best coffee was at Mukwana, downtown, we drove downtown and parked and looked and found no coffee. But we found two city officials 

Sheep Wagon

finishing up the Rawlins clean-up day. Like many places along our route, towns were trying to come alive after a year of, uh, pandemic lockdown, and the clean-up marked Rawlins's start: clean up and open up. Marketing and Project Co-ordinator of Rawlins, Sandra Dent, took us to her office and gave us brochures and a lesson in the famous Rawlins Red Rock, which for decades provided a base for red paint, including the original paint on the Brooklyn Bridge. She told us about the Sheep Wagons, purportedly invented in Rawlins, and these days, it looks like they are providing small homes for Nomadland retirees. She also told us about an app called "There's a Story Here" that provides podcasts for self-tours of many cities, including Rawlins. They have a big block party coming up July 9th & 10th. Looks like a hoot!

But we still hadn't found coffee, and Sandra gave us directions to Mukwana, 

where Taya and Sarah sold us coffee, and talked us into the very light scrumptious donuts they had just made. 

Taya Morrell and Sarah

Two women sat at a table and chatted with us about Canton (one had a sister who had lived there) and gave us advice for our route the next day. I stood there, maskless, marveling at a conversation with strangers. 

We got directions to the grocery store, got lost, asked directions from a friendly young woman tending her yard, her kids and her dog, and found The Market, where we gassed up the car and stocked up our provisions for the last days of driving after we'd stay the night in Sydney, Nebraska. We did absolutely nothing in Sydney but sleep. Nice.