Clean Air, Wide Expanse, and "Points of Interest"

Today, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. (read: I was craving a road trip. It didn't even need to be to anywhere in particular. I just needed to get out of town.), Cari....
and I....

took a road trip to the lovely state of....

(Can you see that? It says Wyoming. Or rather, WYOMING!)

I needed to get out of town. Sometimes this just happens to me. So I went to google maps and looked at the state of Utah and started googling the distances to places I thought looked interesting. Evanston, Wyoming, was the only place that I was curious about that wasn't 5 hours away (and let's be honest, who doesn't want to be able to say they've been to Evanston?). So off we went.

After a mere hour and twenty minutes, we pulled into Evanston.

And then promptly pulled over at the first place that caught our eye.

(Cari's in that picture; can you see her?)

We thought we'd go in and look at some pottery, rocks, and fossils. However, according to the lady in the house next door, it was closed because she had broken her tailbone. Apparently the lady next door is also the owner of the "Pottery, Rocks, and Fossils" store.

So off we went to check out Evanston's Historic Downtown. This is mostly what we found:

Then we moseyed on over to the Historic Railroad District, where there were tons of cars parked but not a person to be found. The "Train Depot Visitor's Center" was apparently not yet built as the City of Evanston's website had enthusiastically proclaimed, and was only planned on being built.

Having read that the Evanston's historic dowtown offered a selection of eateries, we ended up at the only eatery in town and ate there.

Downtown Evanston had offered us enough to know that it was time to leave, so we headed down "Mirror Lake Scenic Byway" and in our lengthy attempt to find the main point of interest (Mirror Lake, which we never did find) we instead found this:

and then were directed on to other "Points of Interest":

This is apparently what we were supposed to be interested in:

There was nothing there. (Well, according to the sign, it used to be the site of the town of Hilliard, which, after the post office closed, "became only a memory." Only, a couple minutes later we drove past the local LDS "Hillliard Ward" building...). Later, we were also directed to another "Point of Interest: Bear River City" only to find a couple houses and a barn.

So, we feigned interest,

and then headed on our way.

To where, you ask?

HISTORIC FORT BRIDGER!!!!!! Fort Bridger offered everything that Historic Downtown Evanston could only halfheartedly muster. It had real live history! A long segment of the Oregon Trail, broken-down wagons inside old sheds, wagon wheels as tall as yours truly, Commanding Officer's Quarters, a cemetery where famous trappers and their half-Indian daughters are buried, a big museum that was closed for the winter, big fields where soldiers used to practice and prance around, the Pony Express horse stall, an itty-bitty school (just think - I could have been a frontier teacher!!!) and ALL SORTS OF REALLY AMAZING HISTORICAL THINGS. It also had another drive-through liquor stand (does that not seem like a really bad and quasi-illegal idea to anyone else?) right next to the "Will-Yum's Restaurant" (which I kind of wish we'd held out for. Apparently it's yummy.).

This is Cari walking down the Oregon Trail. READERS: THIS IS VERY EXCITING. THINK OF ALL THE PEOPLE - some of whom you could very easily be descended from - WHO SHOWED UP AT FORT BRIDGER ON THIS VERY TRAIL SO HAPPY TO SEE SOME SEMBLANCE OF CIVILIZATION before heading into the smoggy, air-so-dirty-it-chemically-burned-my-very sensitive-professor's-skin, crowded Salt Lake Valley! (Note: I may be projecting some of my own current sentiments onto my ancestors. It's not a big deal.)

I will spare you all the pictures, but as it turns out, Fort Bridger was the place to be. Then, and now.