Way Out Yonder...

This last weekend my sister and I took our children to Wyoming for some good ol’ country fun. While we had a good time experiencing the ways of the west, it wasn’t exactly a life changing event like Billy Crystal had in City Slickers. Speaking of City Slickers… well wait, let me start from the beginning:

Denver has this magazine called 5280 and despite the fact that the target market for the magazine is evidently people with incomes over $100,000 a year (yes, they actually say this in the magazine) and the overwhelming ads for plastic surgeons, the magazine is good for letting Coloradoans know about upcoming events and good places to eat. 5280 is what led us to the “Pie Lady” in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Yes this was a long trek for pie, but I happen to be a pie aficionado and an all around expert on pie, so I had to make the trek or other pie devotees wouldn’t take me seriously. Well, the pie was okay, but the service, well it was lousy. Okay, wait, that’s not totally fair; our waitress was very pleasant, but another lady was not so good. Actually she was just downright mean and scary. I had asked for the check because we were there an hour for pie and were trying to get to the tour of the ranch we had planned. She didn’t say anything to us, but yelled “Dawn! Your table wants their check” and stormed off. So we left the restaurant wondering if the place is called the “Pie Lady” as in “Yay! There’s the pie lady” or as in “Ughh, here comes the pie lady. Everyone hide.” Basically we figured out we should just go to Village Inn; it’s closer and the pieces are bigger. I have also never had a mean waitress there. Although, I will say the Blueberry Crunch pie at the PL was really good.

Next we “moseyed” on over to the Terry Bison Buffalo Ranch. We took a fairly inexpensive train ride through the ranch, where we stopped for odd amount of time to look at buffalo. It was a rather peaceful experience, despite the four crazy kids with us. We even saw a “country” wedding, with a trail of grain for the bride to walk on and bride’s maids wore hot pink flip flops with their hot pink and black dresses (which, despite how it sounds, they seriously pulled the look off well and looked great! I mean that! I mean no, I wouldn’t have done it, but I wouldn’t have chosen a bison ranch for a wedding either. Okay, off track again…). The conductor and the tour guide (a really young cow girl) were extremely friendly; however, when we got back to the main registration desk/store I decided that people in Wyoming are not big on pretending that they are friendly for customer service’s sake. After the Pie Lady and the cranky people behind the counter here, I was wondering if it was just a Wyoming thing to be mean to their customers. I mean, there isn’t exactly a wide selection of businesses for people to choose from. I guess they figure “Go ahead, go somewhere else then” because they know you can’t unless you want to drive another hour in flying dirt and tumbleweed in the middle of nowhere to get to someplace that may or may not have better service.

Well, this theory was confirmed when we had dinner at the Capital Grill in downtown Cheyenne that night. Dinner was great, but the service was “oh my gosh” horrible! It took two and a half hours to eat a meal and we were one of two tables that had people in our little area; plus there were two waitresses! I wish I had gotten the other waitress too because she was so attentive and the other people who arrived an hour later left when we did. We were constantly giving her longing looks that maybe, if the stars had aligned better, she could have belonged to us and we would have been out of there much sooner. Alas… instead we got a friendly but negligent girl who disappeared for long periods of time. I know this sounds like a trivial complaint, but if you have children you might know how hard it is to keep four children under six entertained with silverware and a couple of crayons for over two hours. Oh, and she brought their meals at the beginning of the meal. Their meals were long gone by the time ours came and another hour and a half went by with four kids and no food to entertain them even.

Back to Curly in City Slickers… If you have ever seen the movie, Curly is a cranky old cowboy who has little patience for the “City folk” on their cell phones trying to make an attempt at experiencing the west. I think this is how the people in Cheyenne felt about us on our visit. I also think this experience was a test of my new found “relax and enjoy the atmosphere” philosophy and I failed miserably. Our frustration with the service on our wild west outing may have been another clash of the cultures, much like the previous post about the non-rushing philosophy of the Parisians. My sister and I have decided that we might have been able to endure this slow paced atmosphere before we had children, but unfortunately kids don’t allow you to sit back and enjoy things because they are constantly saying things like “When are we going to leave? Are we there yet? Where are we going next? Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!” over and over and over (I could go on here) again until you want to scream and run away. Plus, if I have a mind like a gerbil, imagine my daughter!

So, despite my sister’s rather impressive attempt at making the experience more enjoyable with her use of colorful cowboy lingo (that she learned from her southern husband) like "Slow your roll," "Thata way," and “Wherever the wind takes us,” it was just hard to have a good time when our good moods and adventurous spirits were stifled by screaming kids and less than friendly people, who seemed to just want us to go away. We were also really sad that the waitress sucked the daylight hours away from us and we were forced to watch the sun set over the town’s only movie theater (which seemed neat in a historic way); therefore, we were unable to take a final trek over to the town’s giant painted cowboy boots in the pavilion before we got the heck out of Dodge (or Cheyenne). For a better “county experience, maybe just go to the ranch and then head down to Denver to the White Fence Farm, which is loaded with country-ish stuff, tree houses, a petting zoo, great fried chicken, giant pie slices, and the most important quality they have is their good service.