We had breakfast with our good friend, Michael Glor, before he had to head out to work at Starbucks. The coffee was (naturally) excellent and it was good to continue to chat with one another while we did our blog post for Day 4. We also got to pray together, which is a wonderful way to start the day.
Our first stop down the road was the town of Buford, population of one. It is the nation's smallest town and was recently purchased by a Japanese man for $900,000. Sounds lonely...
It turns out that Brian had never been to an old west town, so Laramie's Wyoming Territorial Prison was a good place to stop. We each were issued a card of a prisoner who had been incarcerated there. We were able to walk around the old prison and the work house. Once we were done with the tour we found out what happened to our assigned people: Mandy's inmate was eventually pardoned; Brian's inmate escaped.
Along the way we saw signs for Little America and $.50 ice cream cones. Due to the abundant sunshine and the heat of the day, we couldn't resist. Turns out that Little America includes a campground, hotel, restaurant, and gift shop. It was started by a man who had once been forced to camp in that spot during a freezing blizzard. During the storm he longed to be sitting beside a warm fire indoors. Years later, he made that happen for many a traveler by opening up the Little America Resort.
State #9 - Utah. It was a bit windy.
We stopped for dinner in Park City, Utah, site of the 2002 Winter Olympics. After dinner we found this monument and decided to get a picture. We pulled up behind what turned out to be a police officer. He kindly told us that we could get the picture, but a presidential detail was going to come down the road any minute. When they did, he told us to stay where we were because we "did not want to get in their way." We didn't end up seeing the detail, but perhaps the excitement accounts for the blurry picture.
Our view out the car window changed quite a bit yesterday. We began in the high plains of Wyoming and saw a few mountain ranges and then entered into very rocky hills and steep cliffs once we got into Utah. One constant feature was that there were always cows or horses around, whether we could see them or not. Supposedly there are more cattle than people in Wyoming, and we believe it.
Our reflection yesterday came after our visit to the territorial prison. There were a few signs in the prison describing the hopes for reform and rehabilitation that prison policymakers had. They believed that through punishment, a convict would come to understand that he was headed in a wrong direction and begin to turn his life around. This got us thinking about how God deals with our lawbreaking. While there are natural consequences to the presence of sin in the world, it is a rare thing in Scripture for God to inflict harm on someone in the hopes that they will turn around. Our suffering here tends to be more the result of living out of sync with the way the world was intended and in rebellion against the Creator God. In his mercy, instead of punishing us until we figured out what was wrong, God sent his Son to die for us, to pay the penalty for our misdeeds and to tell us what was wrong and show us the way out. That way out is Jesus' own life, into which we are baptized and from which we are fed in Communion. We are very thankful that this is God's way of dealing with us. The challenge comes in treating other people in a similar manner.
Once we got to our hotel, we found that it had a Jacuzzi, in which we relaxed for a few glorious minutes before heading to bed. It's amazing how tense you get when you're driving all day.
Day 6 promises to be long but we hope to break it up with a few stops. Stay tuned to find out.
Sounds like an adventure! Good thing the police officer was nice. ;)
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