Wide Open Spaces

Himself and I moved to Wyoming eight years ago from Florida as kind of an experiment. We needed a change, there was a job opportunity, and it sounded cool. Unlike a lot of life choices I have made based on cool factor, this move was a good choice.

Five Reasons I Love Wyoming:

Wyoming is sparsely populated. I love people, in a theoretical, stay-out-of-my-bubble kind of way, so to move to a state that has half the people of my former city? Well, that's a good thing.

About 30 miles south of town, we escape to the
 Laramie range and Medicine Bow
National Forest.

Wyoming has sky and lots of it. There's room in the Wyoming sky for everything and yet there's nothing in it but sky. It's as if, in other places, I'm standing in a box with a beautiful lid on it that's painted to look like a sky, but when I come home to Wyoming, the lid is taken off and the real sky is revealed. I imagine Dorothy felt much the same when she landed in colorful Oz after being ripped out of black and white Kansas. I need some ruby slippers.

Himself and Jas doing some rock walking.

People in Wyoming are friendly. This is most likely due to the fact that they're aren't many of them, but whatever the reason, it's true. People look you in the eye and say hello, they wave from their cars, (and not just with one finger, like in New Jersey), and they make good neighbors. Whether you need a cup of sugar or a box of thirty-aught-six, they've got your back.

There is no traffic in Wyoming, except for the occasional cow or tumbleweed stampede. Actually, it's so windy in Wyoming, the tumbleweeds aren't a problem, since they are usually going faster than the cars. I have been passed by a tumbleweed on the way to the grocery store. (Me, not the tumbleweed. I don't think tumbleweeds shop at Safeway.)

There are rocks in Wyoming that are easily climbable. These are so fun to climb around on, feeling all Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible-ish, without all the hassle of skill, athleticism, or that weird religion.

Nothing is better than a picnic at the top of the world.