On the Road to Nowhere

March 21, 2010: Arrival in Miami Beach, Florida

To say I had the wedding travel jitters would be an overstatement. Perhaps it hadn't sunk in yet, that this would be the last time I would drive through Lander unmarried, the last time I would board a plane unmarried, the last time I would arrive somewhere and pick up my luggage unmarried. The last time I would be a Kat Byerly. The last time I would introduce this man as my fiance.

But it felt like a normal trip, a normal plane ride, a normal late-night dinner, a normal hotel check-in. It still felt a little weird to think of this as any different...

Changes

It's a time of transition, of change, of metamorphosis. Our wedding was outstanding. It was not hitch-less, by any means, but it was perfectly us and was a send-off into the rest of our lives as changed people, new people. I will get into that at a later date, but I wanted to say a little something about all the changes in Lander.

As we returned home, out first home as a married couple, our first home as Husband and Wife, there are new things to discover about the town. The mountains were covered in new snow. Our backyard was covered in new grass. Our floor in covered with new tile. The weather swings back and forth in its traditional orbit of springtime, 60 degrees paired with heavy, roof-creaking snow, and back again.

Restaurants and businesses are coming around with new signs, signs declaring their new summer hours. A new Safeway has opened in Lander, rumored to be the biggest in Wyoming. It is all its cracked up to be, with fresh flowers (I picked up some calle lilies and irises), fresh fish, and naan. Seriously, naan! A new bar, The Forge, will open up this month. An old coffee shop is looking for a new angle (we're rooting for wine bar) to compete with a new coffee shop in an old hamburger drive-in joint. A new diner just opened in an old truck stop. And signs on Main Street direct desperate Lander shoppers to a new clothing boutique, promising women new, over-priced clothing options.

What's next for our small town? What new changes?

It will be nice to be here for the summer, without the pressure of weekend commuting back and forth to Ft. Collins, to see the changes that come.

Back to the Island

Maybe we'll just stay?

Our wedding site: The Hemingway House and Museum in Key West, FL.


Happy marriage to us!

A Tale of What Looks Like Two Different Homes

Somehow, the endless, wide-open plains of Wyoming have led to a trend of making small, square, close-off homes with little thoughts of aesthetics. This is the photographic journey of our search for open space and Mediterranean tile in a tiny mining cabin in Wyoming.

We're missing some "before" photos because the place was kinda ugly and smelled like dead carpet. It wasn't trailer-park green, but it WAS that semi-shag, dirt brown stuff from the early 90s...

Step One: Tear everything down!

Step Two: Make sure the whole house does not fall on top of you (the wall was load-bearing) and use ladder to get upstairs

Step Four: Reassemble stairs and glare at the ugly carpet. Here is a decent shot of what the carpet looked like, and what the living room looks like with no wall

Step Five: Pay people ridiculous amounts of money to lay tile in the living room because you're not sure you should be laying tile with your partner weeks before the wedding. We might not have survived if we did it ourselves. This also involved tearing up rotting subflooring and the completely black-from-mold setting that the stove was sitting on.

Step Six: Open all the windows in the spring air, stain all exposed wood, and return exotic patio furniture to its rightful place in the living room!

We have done some trim work since but haven't had time to really take photos; instead, we're island bound!

This Is Not Normal!

This whole saving daylight or not saving daylight or killing daylight or whatever it is we're doing right now is really messing with me. Getting up before the sun rises is not natural.

But sometimes you can see this as you're pouring your morning coffee and pretending you don't exist yet:

Living in the West is Like Living on Vacation

While Lander may not be the end-all, be-all of small towns out west, I do have to remember how many cool things there are in this area. What most people do on a well-planned and expensive vacation, I can do on an impromptu weekend. Or even in a day, if I started early. Jackson Hole, WY and Grand Teton National Park are the same distance away as the nearest Target. In the summer with no construction, that drive would be similar to the commutes some people in Chicago or DC have to work.

Sometimes I do have to remind myself how lucky I am. These photos can be taken just on the other side of the Fremont-Teton county line. Perhaps this is why people think I'm continuously on vacation? :-)

The Misplaced Mountains

The Tetons are astounding if only because they can be right there, and you may not see them.


They aren't huge mountains, especially if you're used to the Fourteeners in Colorado. The difference is, you can be right next to them, as they slink through the trees, playing with light and shadow and mounds of rock and mud to pretend they aren't really there. But the trees clear for an instant, and the shoulder falls away, and there they are, throbbing awkwardly in the sky above the snowy plains, alone.


The Tetons are freak mountains, lost mountains, misplaced mountains, a skeletal spine of sullen granite that grew roots amidst the emptiness of the Wyoming plains.


You climb the top of a mountain in Colorado and you see empty mountains, an endless cacophony of serrated edges and invisible depths and parasitic mines and rich white Americans looking to conquer them all. But you climb on top of Grand Teton, and you see what you have been seeing on the entire drive across Wyoming... more flat, dusty, boundless Wyoming.