After a long visit in Utah, it was time to head back home.

My adorable mother-in-law sent us on our way with a delicious breakfast of abelskivers, a sweet pancake-like treat that can be eaten with either syrup or jelly and powdered sugar.  It is a favorite of many Utah families, including our own, but strangely I have never seen them on the menu outside of Utah.

We buckled into the car and headed out into the mountains toward Wyoming.

You know you are in Wyoming when you see:

Fireworks stores

Enormous wind turbine farms

and drive-up liquor stores.

The landscape in Wyoming is an interesting cross between mountains and plains.  The sun is bright and high and puts strong shadows on the mountains that can be mistaken for black mineral deposits.

We crossed the Continental Divide, which Wikipedia reminds me is a hydrological divide representing the point where water stops draining into the Pacific Ocean and starts draining into the Atlantic Ocean.

We stopped for lunch in Rawlins, Wyoming at a wonderful Thai restaurant called Anong’s.  They stayed open just for us and were very patient as my son crawled all over the restaurant.  The food was excellent, including these gorgeous summer rolls.

We ordered the yellow Thai curry for our children.  “That’s spicy!” they warned us.  “It’s ok,” we said and they all watched in amazement as our girls ate every morsel on the plate.  Yellow curry is one of their favorites.

For dessert, the restaurant gave us a free “sticky rice.”  This was my first time tasting it.  It looks like this:

It had a little piece of bread on top and some sort of cream.  It was very sweet.  I asked if the brown part on the bottom was raisins.  “No, it’s brown rice!” they told us.   Delicious!

A little more driving and we got to our destination for the evening, Laramie, Wyoming!

We arrived just in time for the “Laramie Days” celebration, including the carnival and “Street Dance.”

We weren’t sure what to expect but the announcement mentioned wearing country attire.  Our little ones put on the cowgirl hats and boots they acquired in Utah on a shopping trip with their grandfather.

They loved the supercute cowboy Uggs that are not only fashionable but comfortable too!

We wandered downtown and found a street carnival packed with Wyomingites, bright lights, food and music.  The girls had their first taste of cotton candy

and first ride on the ferris wheel.

As part of Laramie’s tourism and redevelopment efforts, a large pedestrian walkway bridge was constructed right over the railroad tracks that run through town.  It was a great place to stand to get an aerial view of the festivities.  It also gave an interesting picture of the diversity that exists in Laramie.  On the country stage/beer tent side of the bridge the sound was more like this and on the carnival side it was more club and R&B like this.

Laramie residents were boogying to both kinds of music.

It was one of those perfect summer nights where a warm wind is blowing and the sun sets late.  It was wonderful to be outside walking around.  It also made for great train watching.

As the evening wore on, the band and the street dance portion began.  A local country band was playing and a lively audience consisting of a mixture of high school students (some wearing Future Farmers of America T-shirts) young families and older adults listened and danced.  At one point, the band stopped to yell out:

“Give me a ‘Hell yeah!’”

The crowd weakly responded.

“We’ve got 300 frickin’ people standing out here and you can’t give me a proper ‘Hell yeah!’     Are you guys from Wyoming or not?”

It was tough to fire this crowd up for that “Hell yeah!”

Maybe “Heck yeah!” would have been more effective?

(Side note: One of my random thoughts at this time was trying to come up with a list of distinguishing characteristics between Western and Southern culture.  There is a lot of overlap between the two and some very subtle distinctions.  “Hell yeah!” was one of those distinctions.  After living in Virginia for a while, I am accustomed to hearing the word “hell” with a southern drawl so that it sounds more like “hail.”  I don’t often hear “Hell yeah!” in Virginia– the “yeah” is probably more Western.  You do hear a lot of “Hell no!” however, which when said with a southern drawl has an inherent humor to it that somehow gets lost when you take the drawl away.)

At this point, we left to find a late dinner at McDonald’s, the only restaurant we could find open at that hour and took our tired cowgirls back to the hotel.