Angry Lincoln will Haunt your Dreams

The giant head of Abraham Lincoln looks down upon you, judging you. And I don't think he's happy with what he sees.

Wait - how did we get to this place? First we were having a happy road trip, and now it's judgement day.

Well, it all started in Wyoming. Sometimes I love you, Wyoming. Sometimes you bore me. I don't think I'll ever love you as much as I love Utah, but I hope we can be friends. (It's not you - it's me.) Anyway, about Wyoming - we had a long haul all the way across Wyoming into Colorado, so we looked around on RoadsideAmerica.com to see if there were any quirky attractions waiting for us. Voila! In Laramie, WY, the giant head of Lincoln looks down on the highway, and he looks down on you (because he's better than you, because he's Abraham Freaking Lincoln, that's why).

Giant head of Lincoln? Oh yeah, we're so going there! And so we arrive, and we pose for pictures, and Lincoln disdainfully thinks that I should not be climbing on top of his monument.

Anyway, you're wondering what Lincoln's giant cranium is doing there? I think the I80 used to be called the Lincoln highway, running from San Francisco to New York, and his giant rocky countenance is now situated at the highest point of where the highway used to be.

Nowadays, the road passes by beneath him at a respectful distance, and he's got a posh rest station next to him. (Seriously - it's pretty nice. Little museum off to the side, relatively fancy washrooms, a large glassed in observation deck, and a bored guy surfing the Internet at the front desk.)

So, we communed with Lincoln for a while; he frowned and sent us on our way to our next quirky stop. Hello, Fort Collins, Colorado! I saw the gaudy yellow gates to the Swetsville Zoon, and I clapped my hands with glee (for real).

OMG! Best. Zoo. Ever. Up yours, San Diego - how can you possibly compare? Bill Swets has crafted a huge backyard menagerie of whimsical little figures out of scrap metal - all kinds of dinosaurs and dragons and monsters. Free admission, although one of his little monsters has a cash deposit slot for donations.

Here's just one of his monsters (it's made from a real VW bug!):

I took a million pictures, posted a few.  And I feel quite confident in saying that the Swetsville Zoo is probably the highlight of Fort Collins.


Hopping back into in the car, we said goodbye to Fort Collins, driving on to Loveland (which sits just outside Rocky Mountain National Park). We're trying to find a hotel. Stephen's GPS is possessed by the devil (like all GPS units). He said he updated it before we left, but that little hellspawn is out of date, no matter what it says. It couldn't find the Econolodge in Billings, it imagined the non-existent America's Best Value Inn in Jackson Hole, and now it's expecting a cloverleaf where there is none, and so we accidentally bypassed our exit. We went back and forth, and back again, and finally stopped at the promisingly-named "Value Inn" to see if they had a room. They had a price of $219 a week listed on the side of their building - but, with advertising like that, all their rooms were taken.

However, the desk clerk checked around for us, and sent us off to a Super 8 (back in Fort Collins). Back we go. Random road workers comment that there sure are a lot of silver X-Terras from Saskatchewan, because that's the fifth one they've seen go by.

You know what's super about the Super 8? It's cheap! What's not so super? No fridge or microwave. Super? They have rooms available. Not so super? No elevators, and we're on the second floor. Super: Internet. Not so super: slow. Hmm. Let's call it a draw.

Went to the Hacienda Real for supper. Holy crap, Mexicans feed you a lot of food. I can't finish my meal, and I still feel like I should immediately run out and do some manual labour.  Anyway, that's all for now.  Tomorrow, we're heading into Rocky Mountain Park.