Crossing the Center

"She stood in the storm, & when the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails."  ~Elizabeth Edwards

The next morning saw us leaving Laramie and heading into Colorado.

These sentinels guarded our path.

I was feeling out of sorts so I decided I would just tool around Fort Collins and geocache for a bit to distract myself.  It worked wonders and soon we were heading east, geocaching our way across the great expanse of middle America.

Seeing some beautiful views...

...and discovering some painful obstacles...

These beauties were growing like weeds...

We found some really cool old buildings...

And some lush grass for rolling...

And some really unique little towns!

We even discovered where the sidewalk ends!

 The grasslands of central Colorado were stunning!

And also good for rolling :)

We stopped for the night at North Sterling National Park.  It was mostly dark when we got there but I had time to get this stunning shot of the campground and the tail end of the sunset.  

My only successful star shot, and one of my favorite shots of this trip overall!

These guys were all over the campground!

This ended up being our view in the morning...

So we went down for a closer look...

Eventually we finished slogging around scaring the local wildlife and got back on the road.  Thanks to our frequent geocache stops we discovered a ton of cool places we never would have discovered otherwise!

Yup, that is a tractor parked on the street with all the other cars...

...

This was a particularly cool find.  Apparently this rock was always getting tagged and vandalized so an artist in the area started painting murals on it.  Every year he paints a new one.  This was the current offering.  There's a little covered area that tells the story and shows some pictures of past murals.  Its become something of a local legend...

And has become a local memorial as well.

 There was this crazy little antique shop in an old derelict greenhouse and spilling out into a fantastic little yard.  The shop was only officially open on Sundays for a couple hours in the afternoon, but the owner (whose house was behind the greenhouse) apparently left it open for geocachers and I found myself blissfully exploring this bizarre place looking for the cache.

 This was the particularly clever cache that had a hidden trick to opening it.  I loved the theme and the trick, though it was significantly more high tech than anything else in its environment!

Finally we headed north into Wisconsin to meet up with the fabulous +Liz Kaetterhenry for some more adventures!