First, I should mention — especially since we have a lot of newcomers to this blog — that if you’re not following along with the nightly Flickr uploads on this trip, you’re missing half the show.  That’s where I post the higher quality, website-worthy subjects:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/agilitynut/

Secondly, if you check my blog post in the morning and, say, you’re on the East Coast and the sun is up — and the post isn’t up yet.  Fret not!   It means I just could not keep my eyes open any longer and needed to finish up the post in the morning.  If you are curious where the dogs and I have sacked out for the night — I update the notebox on this map each night with our location.  It’ll put your mind at ease that we weren’t killed and eaten by a bear.  Favorite it if you like:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/agilitynut/7546126074/

The forecasters got it right for a change:  beautiful sun all day long.  Quite different from yesterday’s aggravation.  And it meant I covered a lot of miles today.  Since it was Sunday and we were in remote places, traffic was light.  Still no tickets yet — but I was sure flying down those secondary highways today.  I think I’d better lighten up on the gas pedal tomorrow as my luck is probably running out.

The only bummer today was towards the very end of the day, I discovered that I had my camera on a wrong setting.  Which meant the photos were ALL somewhat overexposed.  Argh!!!  Fixable with Photoshop and you can hardly tell the difference — but I can!  Just not quite the clarity and color I should have had.  This happens to me every time I do a lot of night shooting like last night — and then I forget to reset.  I’m a little stupid with fatigue after 23 days.  Usually, I notice this within the first hour or two — but never the whole day!  I hope I’ve learned my lesson this time.

The shooting started in Laramie — so let’s begin there.  A Moose Lodge — wasn’t the Jackie Gleason character on TV a member?  Shooting directly into the morning sun here — best angle I could get:

More Laramie.  Busted neon projections:

Still Laramie.  A real tragedy.  I was really looking forward to seeing this sign.  What the hell happened?  Could wind or weather do this?  Here’s what the sign looked like originally:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/turbguy/2762911265/

From Saratoga — where the dogs got a nice dip in a big lake til they were all shivering like mad:

Lots of great stuff in Rawlins.  I couldn’t make out the original name of this place from the ghost letters.  Black & white vitrolite:

A comical mid-century updated Elks Lodge:

This eagle has seen some tough times.  Looks like it got banged up, a chunk replaced, repainted crudely — and now almost unrecognizable — without the name, I’d not even be able to make out what it was.  Don’t forget, or if you’re a newbie to this blog, all my photos are clickable (clicking on them takes you to a larger photo):

Moving on to Rock Springs.  Remember film?

A Wonder Bread quonset hut.  Still housing Hostess Foods and a Wonder Bread panel truck nearby.  The quonset hut building is suggestive of a loaf of bread, no?

On to Green River:

An incredible brewery building.  Note the giant chalices on top.   There’s also a keg detail on the side of the building.  More about the place here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetwater_Brewery

On to Pinedale.  Way out of the way — but I went there for a giant trout.  And was rewarded with several incredible signs.  Here are a couple “junky” ones that don’t rate the Flickr stream or my website — but love them still:

On to La Barge to check out the situation with the Moondance Diner.  I had heard it was closed so I was prepared for that.  Great ambitions but I guess this little town (population ~ 400 people) and the scant amount of tourists couldn’t sustain it.  The diner was moved here a few years ago from my hometown of New York City.  It cost a fortune to transport it and fix it up.  Very sad.  Supposedly, built in the 1930s but you’d never know it now.  It looks so unauthentic inside and out (as it did in NYC before being moved) that  you gotta wonder why they didn’t just start from scratch and put up some modern Starlite diner or some icky fake-o retro build-on-site thing:

Shot thru the window:

Daylight ran out in Kemmerer.  Kinda funny portrait sign:

So that’s a wrap.  And a late one since it’s now 7am and I’m sitting in a grey haze in Evanston.  Not so lucky today maybe.  Although this stuff has a way of burning off.  I’m staring at a bunch of dinosaurs across the street that deserve some sunlight.  At the first glimmer of light, or after an hour, we’ll be off.  Northward and up into the mountains today.