Wyoming... Pt. 3- How Could it Get any Worse??

I woke up at 5am to elephants stomping around in the room above me... wait, I guess they weren’t elephants, so I suppose it had to be 3-5 sumo wrestlers in the room walking around oh so gingerly. After fighting the urge to get a stick and bang on my ceiling (where was I going to get a stick?) I put a pillow over my head and got another 20 minutes of sleep before my alarm went off and I had to get up and ready for a 7am departure to Pinedale... oh what fun. The drive, like before, was boring and long and I ate sunflower seeds the whole time just to keep me occupied and give me something to keep me awake.

Upon arrival McD told me that she would be sending CoPilot with me to do a large area assigned to me in case I needed help. Awesome! I wouldn’t have to go it alone... little did I know that had I been alone, I probably would never had made it back alive!

CoPilot and me set off in my car (with me driving and him earning his name CoPilot). The area we were doing was about 10-15 minutes back the direction that we just came from, so we set off, enjoying the fact that we had someone to talk to besides our imaginary friends. CP told me when to turn off the main road and this is when we got our first look at our new area... it was huge... and as soon as you got off the main road ALL the roads were unkempt dirt roads. Remember what car I got from the rental place?



We threw ourselves into work and found that this wasn’t going to cut us any breaks at all. CP did the first block while I drove, stopping in front of each house, which went well. I did the next block (so that we got even numbers between us) and as I was driving down the road I asked “Is that a fence in the middle of the road?” Yes, indeed it was. Someone had decided, HEY a fence would go great here! and built said fence right through the road. Turning around was the big problem and we ended up going through the weeds and dirt to get to a driveway that would take up back to the road... Don’t mind us folks! We’re from the government!

Fast forward to after lunch. We are hot and dirty and have come across more roads that don’t exist or don’t connect than we can count. We are constantly editing the maps and roads. CP was doing a block and we came to a particularly bad spot in the road where the bottom of the car kept making these fun crunchy noises as it scraped on the dirt from the ruts. I turned the car so that we could finish the block and shortly after I brought the car to a hault... this is what I saw...



That’s right. There in front of us about 3 feet was the road we were trying to get to and between it and us was a ditch about 3 feet deep. CP and I sat there just saying over and over, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME??” “REALLY?” There was no way to get to the road by this way and the road was so narrow that CP had to get out and help me turn the car around without falling off the road.

Once we were out of that...

In one certain area there were no numbers on the houses except for the first one on the road so we had to guess what the other ones were... #50... the next one should be 52, the next should be 54... oh there’s a house down here with a number... #66?? Well that is the opposite of helpful... CP and I looked at each other... fuck it... go with it.

One thing that kind freaked us out all day was all the white pickup trucks that we saw. I mean they are EVERYWHERE! If you live in Wyoming for so long do they give you a white truck as a prize for surviving hell? That would be the only explaination why people stuck around...

They liked to look meanly at us as they drove by in their huge trucks, spewing dust and exhaust into the air. Don’t mind us, this is just your tax dollars hard at work....

As the day progressed we swore a LOT more often and a LOT louder. Especially when we came upon roads like this that were completely unpassable.


How do people even live here???

At one point we ran into our ACL Sandwich... wha? We pulled along side each other and asked “What are you doing here?” The first thing out of his mouth was “This fucking sucks!”. Our sentiments exactly. Turns out that he had the outside of this hell hole while we had the inside area. Something that really was upsetting though was that we overlapped and that shouldn’t happen EVER. We went our separtate ways and CP and I felt bad for Sandwich because he had to go it alone... and then we realized that he had an SUV and we had and Aveo... the sympathy stopped right there.

We were to meet the rest of our crew at 5:30 and around ten till 5 we were getting close to finishing our last block. It was a biggie and giving us all the same problems that we were having with previous blocks (roads to nowhere or that don’t exist). We were coming up to a road and turning right when I looked to the left and said to CP “That kid is pointing a gun at us... ... That kid is really pointing a gun at us!!” Next thing we knew there was a loud PING on my side of the car. I immediately stopped and CP and I got out to look at the car. There wasn’t any damage but when we turned to look for the kid he was headed off on his bike. Since we were running so close to the deadline we decided to continue on since there was no damage to the car(at least not from the BB gun.)

We pulled in front of a large house and as we were trying to figure out what the address was a man came out and we explained who we were and why we were sitting in front of his house. He was really nice (which is kinda a shocker when that happens) and we got the info we needed from him. He told us that if we go up this little dive next to his house it would be easier to turn around up there than in his driveway. Wow... thank you! so up the little drive sure enough was a large flat area for us to turn around which I did and then headed back down the drive... for a second anyway... until the passanger front wheel slipped off the road and we were successfully in a ditch not going anywhere! SHIT!! Luckily, like I said before, this guy was super nice and when he heard the commotion he came out and got his truck and a chain and pulled us out. I sat in the car and manned the controls...



As you can see, I’m working hard.

After this fiasco we said fuck it all and went to the meeting place... but not before stopping to get beer to take back to the hotel so that we wouldn’t have to run out later.

At the meeting place we found out that we were going to leave some of the cars there and carpool back to Rock Springs!! Yay! Me and CP went with Sandwich and was that a fun ride! We swore and told horror stories about our areas all the way back. By the end of the trip I had successfully lost my voice and was hacking up a storm. Very lady like.

As soon as I got back to the hotel I took a shower and changed into some nice clean clothes! Plans were that everyone was coming back to my room to watch the Nuggets game and drink beer. My mini fridge was stocked and we ordered pizza. The end of the day was fun, chilling with all my co-workers, drinking beer and eating pizza. There was plenty of swearing and telling of stories. I was just happy to not be driving on dirt roads any more.

The Nuggets won and the night ended. Could tomorrow possibly be any worse???