The New West - Part I

A week ago, and a bit more, we took a few turns around Vancouver, British Columbia, a place which, while drier than usual, still featured the classic greens of the Pacific Northwest. This week we're driving around the newest incarnation of what was once The Wild West, as it confronts the new America, and perhaps begins to shape part of it. 
The first leg leg last Friday took us to the town of Verdi just outside Reno, Nevada, where we were staying with a friend who had just moved there from the Bay Area. (Now don't start thinking opera when you go to pronounce this town's name, it's vur-DIE.) Verdi is a very small town, only a few miles from the California border, which has inherited in the last ten years or so tens of thousands of newcomers in a vast housing development and golf course.
The development is very much planned, and mixes gated and non-gated communities, and is still very much under development. It's a very attractive proposition for a Californian dismayed by the lack of affordable housing, since a 1500-ish square footer can be had for under half a million, with a view and a garage. A lot of the offerings are seniors-only, which makes the community very quiet, though there is regular if not heavy foot, bike, and motor traffic. 

It is sort of a natural consequence of both Nevada's magnetic properties for Golden Staters, and Reno's explosive growth in the last twenty years or so. And I do wonder what it will look like in 30 years, when quite a few of the current residents have died, and the houses start to age.
After a walk with very pleasant views and a quiet night, we were off to Wendover, Utah - well, really West Wendover, Nevada and Wendover, Utah, which blend enough that, like Stateline, Nevada, require lines and labels to show the state transition. Though really it's not a secret in either case, since the plethora of high-rise casinos gives the state identity away.
Wendover is not as large as the Tahoe area, however, and after some scanning of the restaurant offerings, we dejectedly opted for yogurt and a banana from the local super as a workable enough dinner. The Marshall Tucker band was in town to play a venue there - we missed them, however. The Race Week was happening at Bonneville Salt Flats - ditto. In fact, as I considered a confluence of events that would attract people of a different stripe, I'm not sure I could have found a more effective approach. Oh, yeah, I forgot the casino factor, even more effective.
The comfort of the motel notwithstanding, the sun was not high in the sky when we hightailed it out of town - next stop, Salt Lake City.There was nice weather, not too much heat, in "SLC", where it proved to be easiest, if a little intimidating, to seek restrooms in the Latter Day Saints' center of the world - well, not the Tabernacle, but at least the info center hard by. Plenty of Stories of Jesus and carefully-coiffed women as expected.
Also magnificent views of surrounding mountains from the Capitol nearby. But we had to make way toward our ultimate day's rest in Rawlings, Wyoming. (We made a stop in Little America, represented in at least two locations in these two big states, but all we took away was that they have clean bathrooms and long lines of sapped tourists for their touted 75-cent cones.)

(above, flowers on the road to Wyoming.)Now Rawlings, despite its Hampton and Holiday Inn Express, has to be a good example of a Wyoming, or even high plains, town - one suffering the hollowing of the old core businesses, but moving right along. They even commemorate the "Pen":
(Deer grazing in front of the former penitentiary)

The improbably-named Shogun's Pizza cranks out a creditable product, too.