I didn’t write a blog entry yesterday, because it would have been brutally short: 536 miles through the rain, nuthin’ to see. Well, it wasn’t quite that bad: we saw a nice range of snow-capped mountains near Butte, Montana; and a long black line of cattle, marching single-file along a fence by the highway. And we drove past the scene of Custer’s Last Stand, near the Wyoming border, but David wasn’t interested in stopping (I saw it on an earlier trip, on a sunny afternoon 10 years ago, and it still makes me shiver). All across Montana and Wyoming, the meadows and open range were the soft, pale green of early spring; but while it was quite pleasant to see, I have to agree with David’s overall analysis: “monotonous.”

On the other hand, we were traveling at 80 miles per hour for much of the day; it’s hard to see anything (other than the cars immediately around you) at that speed. Maybe next time I’ll travel by motorcycle, a la Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — a wonderful book whose author, Robert Pirsig, once taught college in Bozeman, Montana if I remember correctly. (By the way, if you want to see a dozen photographs of Pirsig’s 1968 motorcycle trip, upon which the book is based, click here. Isn’t the Internet amazing?!?)

This business of driving at 80 mph raises another interesting point: there certainly isn’t much evidence of an “energy crisis” out on America’s highways. I felt a little guilty driving at such high speeds, but the driving limit was 75 mph all along the Interstate highways — and I was frequently passed by people doing 90 mph or more. Not only that, there were lots of big trucks out on the road (this is the American West, after all), and lots of SUVs, minivans, RVs, and campers. I saw only one Hummer (bright yellow, and thus visible all the way to the horizon), but I don’t recall seeing any hybrid-engine cars. I don’t know what it will take to change America’s driving habits significantly, but it will certainly take a lot more than $3 per gallon!

Anyway, we pulled into a Holiday Inn in Sheridan, Wyoming for a nice dinner — after which David retired to his room to track down re-runs of Law and Order on television. And I retired to my room to take advantage of the hotel’s wireless Internet service — only to find that (a) my outbound email messages were bouncing back to me, (b) the hotel provided no “public” SMTP server for guests to send their outbound email, and (c) they didn’t give a damn if it was inconvenient. Interestingly, every hotel we’ve stayed in during this trip has had some form of free high-speed Internet service; but in the majority of cases, it hasn’t been effective: weak wireless signals, non-functioning routers, no SMTP server, etc, etc. Luckily, I brought along my own high-speed EVDO wireless modem card, so I’ve been able to get online every night; the connection isn’t really high-speed in some rural areas, but it’s better than nothing…

Alas, it was more of the same today: 418 miles of open highway, and very little to see. Oh, yeah, there were endless meadows and open range; an occasional cluster of rocky buttes and small hills. But Wyoming — at least the central and southern parts of the state — seemed pretty featureless today. We zoomed through Casper and Cheyenne and a few dozen tiny little towns that were forgotten as soon as we went through them … except for Chugwater, which not only has an unforgettable name, but also an upcoming “chili cookoff” in mid-June. (If you can’t attend in person, click here to submit your own special chili recipe for consideration in the contest!) And we pulled into Denver at 4 PM, dropped off our rental car, and walked a couple blocks to the downtown Marriott Hotel, where we’ll spend the night before catching a flight back to New York tomorrow.

So that brings us to the end of the trip. The weather could have been better, and we probably could have driven more slowly and stopped to see a few more local attractions. But it was an enjoyable 10 days, and we did manage to see quite a lot in the 3,300 miles that we covered. It’s also interesting to note what we didn’t see:

• working windmills — we saw no windmills at all in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, British Columbia, Alberta, or Montana. We did see quite a few of them today, as we drove through Wyoming, but almost all of them stood stock-still. What ever happened to the idea of windmills spinning madly in the breeze, pumping water into ponds for the cattle and farm animals?
• wind generators — again, almost nothing in the early portions of the drive. I noticed a few along Interstate 90 in Montana yesterday, situated in pairs. But typically one set of propeller blades was spinning slowly, while its partner sat still. Only this morning did we see a cluster of approximately 20 wind generators, most of which appeared to be functioning.
• roadside diners and local restaurants — a victim of the Interstate highway system, and the proliferation of big-chain fast-food restaurants, the local restaurants with home-style cooking have just about disappeared. I can recommend the new frescata sandwiches at Wendy’s, but I’ve had my fill of McDonald’s for quite a while.
• funny license plates and bumper stickers — the only one I saw was a bumper sticker that said, “If you can read this, I’ve lost the trailer I was towing.”
• awareness of the war in Iraq — we didn’t take any surveys, and we didn’t spend any time talking with local people in the towns we drove through, so this observation may be entirely inaccurate. But we also saw none of the yellow-ribbon bumper stickers so common in other parts of the country; no billboards, signs, or placards for or against the war (except for one small sign in the middle of a field, in southern Idaho, that said simply, “Support our troops.”) No discussions overheard in the various restaurants, hotels, or gas stations; no headlines in local newspapers. As far as I can tell, Washington seems as alien to the folks in this part of the country as Baghdad. I can hardly blame them…

So, perhaps there will be another installment of “Travels with David” five years from now; perhaps there won’t. Time will tell…