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Travel gives perspective on home
By Eric O'Link
Published:
Thursday, June 12, 2003
Eric O´Link -- Staff Essay
I love traveling.
I enjoy visiting and learning about new places, perhaps getting a taste of the local culture and bringing home a souvenir or two.
And there's another thing about going places that I appreciate: the perspective they they give me on home.
Last month, I went to visit family in the city of Casper, Wyo. Casper is an interesting place; it's situated along a river in a shallow valley with an 8,000-foot mountain to the south and open rangeland to the north, as far as the eye can see.
There are about 50,000-some people who live in Casper, which is by itself and doesn't have any sort of metro area like we do in St. Cloud. So here you have a city about the size of St. Cloud with no suburbs and, believe it or not, it's the second largest city in Wyoming.
In St. Cloud, of course, when we get bored with doing things in the local area, we head down to the Twin Cities where there is always SOMETHING going on.
Casper, however, is several hours away from Cheyenne, Wyoming's capital city - which, incidentally, is not a whole lot bigger than Casper. You don't get to a major metro area until you've been driving south for about six hours, when you run into Denver. It's probably hard for many Minnesotans to imagine living in a St. Cloud-sized town with no other major cities within a three or four hour drive, but that's the way things are in Wyoming.
In fact, while the number of lakes in Minnesota is impressively large, in Wyoming there are impressively few. While driving on highways in Wyoming where you can see for miles in every direction and there isn't one single lake. The only evidence of water is dry washes that have been carved like mini-canyons into hillsides.
There are a few "lakes" in the Casper area - at least that's what people in Wyoming call them. But really, they're reservoirs, cold and deep, beginning in a canyon at one end and ending with a dam at the other.
People even have "lake cabins" there, but they're a far cry from Minnesota's scenic log lake homes, nestled among stately pine trees towering above a lakeshore. Instead, at Alcova Reservoir - about 40 minutes southeast of Casper - the cabins are packed around the lake's bays in a sardine-like manner. Trees are few, sagebrush is plentiful and if you stray from the sandy, so-hot-it-burns-your-feet trail you're likely to stick yourself on prickly pear or yucca cactus.
Going to Alcova reminds me of one of those desert resort towns that hugs an artificial lake as though it were clinging to life itself.
My cousin Kyle likes to joke that the highway department built the interstate highways through the desolate, non-beautiful parts of Wyoming so that nobody who visits will come back. I suppose he has a point, as a scant 400,000 some people call the state home.
I'd have to agree with Kyle, because last month I discovered that there are some exceptionally beautiful parts of Wyoming. While there, I was lucky enough to spend two days visiting Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.
Here, I saw towering 13,000-foot snowy mountain peaks, a thundering 300-foot waterfall, a variety of wildlife including elk and buffalo, vast forests, beautiful valleys and a whole manner of stinking, roaring, steaming and colorful thermal features like geysers and hot springs.
Both parks were breathtaking and I found myself wishing I had two weeks, not two days, to explore them. Even so, I found myself glad to return to St. Cloud.
Casper is certainly not a bad place and Yellowstone was so amazing it defies description, but for all of Wyoming's raw beauty, Minnesota's still my favorite place. I love our lakes, our trees, our countless towns and cities and of course our lake cabins.
So, travel is doubly therapeutic for me: it's a chance to escape home to discover new things and it's an opportunity to realize how great it is to come home again.
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