Home On The Range And The Mile High City

5 days. 4 nights. 1614 miles. 206 pictures. 1 fun road trip.

***WARNING: This will probably be pretty long, but I will try to keep it entertaining. And I'll try not to post ALL 206 pictures that I took.***

Brady had a job interview in Bill Wyoming last Wednesday. Yes, Bill Wyoming. You've probably never heard of it for good reason. It's about a 6 hour drive from here. I decided that we should all go up there because, if he gets the job I'd like to see the place where we'll be moving to. When he got off work on Tuesday I already had the car packed up and we headed on our way through exciting Wyoming. Let's just say I'm glad most of the drive was dark...because there really is nothing to see.

We finally got to our hotel in Casper (because there are no hotels in Bill, and Casper, being about 1 1/2 hours away from Bill, is the closest city with any hotels) at about 11:30 that night and poor Brady had to be at his interview at 7:30 the next morning, meaning he had to leave just before 6 am. Jaydin and I hung out most of the day at the hotel since Brady took the car with him. When he got home that afternoon, we drove around to see the sights. Mostly wind, dirt, sagebrush, and antelope. They did have a mall, so we went there for a little while. The next morning, we got up and checked out of the hotel. Brady didn't have to be back to work until Monday, so we figured we'd already driven this far we might as well find something fun to do. We thought about going the long way home through Yellowstone, but it was going to be snowy. Mount Rushmore is only about 3 hours away, so we thought about going there but it was supposed to snow there too.

I've never been to Colorado, and Denver is only 3 1/2 hours from Casper, so we decided to spend a couple nights in the Mile High City.

We checked into our hotel and went for a drive to see the City. We decided to go to the 16th Street Mall. After paying $16 for parking, we wandered the mall for about a half hour before Jaydin started to get hungry and cranky. As we were getting in the car, Jaydin witness her first drug deal. It was very exciting (aka scary!) and reminded me that I was not in my bubble of Utah anymore :)

The next morning we started off by going to the Forney Museum of Transportation. It doesn't sound very exciting, but Brady being the train geek he is (did I mention his job interview was for Union Pacific?), heard they had the 4005 Big Boy there. The museum was actually a lot cooler than I thought it would be. The train was HUGE. They also had tons of really old and rare cars. And some old fire engines that my dad would love.

Here are Brady and Jaydin in front of Amelia Earhart's car and posing in a Model T. (I don't think I have a single picture the whole trip of Jaydin actually looking at the camera).

After the museum, we went to the Denver zoo, which was way fun. I won't bore you with the many pictures I took of all the animals. The zookeepers had a ball python that they were letting kids pet so of course, my mean husband let my sweet innocent daughter pet the wretched serpent. Disgusting! Thank goodness for hand sanitizer. We spent several hours at the zoo and after we got Jaydin in the car, it took her about 2 seconds to end up like this:

After that, we had planned to go to the Wings Over Denver Air & Space museum, but I wanted to let Jaydin sleep, so I stayed in the car with her and read my book while Brady went to the museum by himself. It was more for him anyway. All airplanes are the same to me :) When he was done with that Jaydin woke up and we went to the Downtown Aquarium. For an aquarium in a land-locked state, it wasn't too bad. We actually walked through it twice. I took lots of pictures of fish that I won't bore you with. We did lots more driving exploring the city and seeing everything we could squeeze in to our short trip such as:

The Molly Brown House:


















Cool street signs:



















The Platt River:

And the Denver Mint (which, suprisingly I did not get any pictures of). We left for home early Saturday morning and took the scenic route through Colorado instead of going back up through Wyoming. It was a few hours longer drive, but it was much prettier. We were able to experience all 4 seasons within about 2 hours. From about 55 degrees and sunny to 28 degrees and snowing, then back to the mid-50s and cloudy, then to 70 and sunny again. It was quite fun. These pictures were taken about 20 minutes apart:

So those are pretty much the highlights of our road trip...oh except for the new friend we made. Meet Mr. Bug:

That's it and thanks for sticking with me to the end. We had a great time and Jaydin did much better than we ever expected. I hold a special place in my heart for the person who invented the portable DVD player, they saved my sanity.