The missing blog from yesterday:

Sorry guys – tonight I am in b.f.e. Wyoming – or rather, Buffalo Wyoming, and can’t connect, though they claim to have “data ports.” In any case, I have a lot to say about today, and none of it really works with the list format I was using. So this one will be slightly different, and I’ll post it tomorrow. I woke up in Denver, CO early – 8am, probably because of the 2 hour difference from EST – enjoyed a continental breakfast and headed to the Denver Zoo, which was WONDERFUL. Their exhibits are set up such that you’re always very close to the animals, and if they think you want to be closer, they often set up little indoor rooms along the outdoor habitats where they put nothing but a tinted pane of glass between you and the animals. This was the most effective with the Macaques – a kind of monkey who rather enjoyed studying their reflections and putting their hands to the glass – but even more so with the Gorillas. I happened upon the Gorillas at a moment where there was a young one inspecting the hay by the glass and the big, bad silver-backed leader of the pack decided HE wanted that spot, so he abruptly charged (at the glass!), banged his chest full-on King Kong styles, and then promptly swung around and displayed his enormously muscular posterior at us. When he was done looking like a bad-ass (literally) he sat down perpendicular to the glass and appeared to morosely contemplate his aggression. This means one could go up to the glass, turn side ways, and basically be face to face with a great ape. His features were gigantic – the flat-nose, the deep eyes, the fat fingers – and simply amazing to study so closely.

There were also hippos – I took about 4 billion pictures; a rainforest display (with a fish about the size of me in length, quite literally the biggest fish I’ve ever seen!) full of all kinds of amphibia and reptilia; plenty of scraggly looking versions of African quadropods; tons of other monkeys and monkey-type animals (the Golden-Headed Tamarins in particular awed me – they’re like mini versions of a cross between a spider monkey and a lion); rhinos, elephants; African Wild Dogs, Bat-Eared Foxes, wolves; sea lions, penguins, peacocks roaming freely…but the other best besides the Gorillas and the Hippos were the Bears, who were active and playful. One Asiatic Black Bear had just had a cub in January – cuter than cute – and two grizzlies -- who were born and orphaned in 2002 and thus picked up by the zoo – were chasing each other all over their habitat. The polar bears were more low key but beautiful in person. I have great videos and pictures of everything. The only mildly disappointing exhibit was the felines, who were either MIA or asleep. Though there was a great placard outside the puma enclosure showing a tourist’s photo of a woman holding her daughter out in some park or other, and in the bushes not 20 feet behind them is a puma looking quite involved and poised to pounce. The people, of course, did not know it was there until they developed the film.

That put me through to about 12:30pm, when I quite innocently decided to get a quick oil change and head to Wyoming. The phone book had a Valvoline listed on pearl street – pearl street in BOULDER, that is. An hour later, I figured this out. So I stopped in a gas station to find any old oil-change place, and they directed me to “Pep Boys,” a chain that does repair, sells parts, and changes oil. The woman said it would be 45 minutes, but an hour and a half later, I was still sitting there while my car baked in the sun, unmoved and unnoticed. So I took my keys back and decided to drive to the AAA office in the city, because THEY would know where there was a gul-blamed oil changerie. And of course, a block before I got there, I spotted a jiffy-lube. They were great and changed my oil quickly, and I also had them coat my windshield with stuff that makes rain-water bead – it was on sale cheap and I knew I’d be driving into rain. (It works like a dream – so well that the wipers are hardly necessary. They clear water up on the first sweep, but stick on the way back down!)

By the time I hit the road, it was 4:15pm. I was pissed. I just barely dodged Denver’s rush hour (the radio a half an hour out of town reported that there was a major accident on every side of every major highway going through Denver by 5pm!). Fortunately, Wyoming from South to North is only about 7 hours long, so somewhere along the way I decided to stay here in Buffalo, about an hour from the Northern border, which put me in here at about 9:45pm – a waste of good scenery, but I saw a lot before it got dark. The sky was full of clouds and the land was so low-lying and panoramic that there were vistas in the sky to match the vistas on the land. I had mountains to my left, dark and covered in rain; pasture to my right, with red desert dirt and sage-looking bushes on hills and buttes; and before me, a vast spread of clouds, sometimes so thick as to be ceiling-like, and sometimes bursting at the seams with sunlight. It was captivating and held my attention. The rain wicked off my waxed windshield and made me feel like I was inside a soda bottle. It literally looked like the windshield was effervescing.

The only interesting town name was “Chugwater, WY.” And also, “Crazy Woman River, WY.”

About an hour before I got into Buffalo, I hit Casper. Craving Chicken Tenders and a little carbonated sustenance, I pulled into a Burger King. As I was filling my soda at the self-serve station, I hear a raspy male voice on the other side of the room going, “I bet SHE wants one!” and a meeker voice saying, “who?” and the first voice saying, “the girl in purple.” (I was indeed wearing a purple shirt.) There’s nothing like some strange man vocalizing about what a woman “wants” to make one instantly paranoid, but I shifted calmly into my tall-girls-are-intimidating-persona and sat on the other side of the room to eat quickly. But I made the mistake of glancing over to see who was being so loud and of course, made eye contact. His name was Jessie and what I “wanted” was actually a rough-hewn garnet from a little tin he’d been collecting. He was college-aged and totally innocuous, just tired and loopy and overly extroverted. I say this with all confidence because he didn’t hit on me, he just insisted I have a garnet and went back to his seat. As I got up to leave, I had his friend take a picture of us so you guys can put a face to the weirdo. But like I said, he wasn’t lewd, so it just made me smile; providence is a strange bird indeed. (Of all the Burger Kings in all the towns in all the world, I had to walk into HIS, Sandie!)

Now I’m tired and hoping to make it to Missoula, Montana in daylight, barring the unforeseen. The desk clerk here reported that the hotel is full because there was a snow storm everyone hit that turned them back…I’ll be checking the weather in the AM.