WY Day 5 - Cocktails, Crags, and Camping
Today was mostly a driving day, as I made my way back across almost the entire state for what I wanted to see tomorrow. It was beautifully scenic day but not a particularly eventful one. I started by getting some more strong Russian coffee from Dazbog Coffee in Cheyenne to fuel the first leg of my travels.
Two and half hours later I made it to the cool artsy small town of Casper (no friendly ghosts in sight though, sadly). It had been my intention to check out the Nicolaysen Art Museum, which I’d read really good things about, but in a bit of bad timing some hot shots had rented out the museum for a wedding while I was there. Very inconsiderate of them to put their love of each other above my love of art.
It stung, but I moved on and healed myself with some good food therapy at Racca’s Pizzeria Napoletana. They specialize in Wood Fired pizzas and authentic Southern Italian flavors. The restaurant’s founder trained under Pizza Masters (I’m just assuming that’s the term) in Naples, and opened the first certified authentic Neapolitan pizzeria in all of Colorado before moving to Casper and opening up the only one in the entire state of Wyoming. They claim that they make the best pizza in all of Wyoming and I think they might be able to back that claim up. Good god do they make a delicious pizza. I wanted to try both the pizza and their fantastic sounding Limoncello chicken so I got the Linguria, which came with Fresh Mozzarella and Pecorino Romano cheeses, that good Limoncello Chicken Breast, Red Onion, Grape Tomatoes, Basil Pesto, Pine Nuts, and a healthy dose of olive oil. The flavors were out of this world with the perfectly tender chicken pieces adding a nice citrus-y sting to add some zest to the cheese and pesto flavors. And it was all supported by a beautiful crispy wood fired crust that couldn’t have been a better base. Normally eating an entire pizza alone would be something I’m ashamed of, but in this case it was actually really delightful.
Looking for more fun, weird things to do in Casper before heading out I stumbled across Backwards Distilling Company, which quickly became one of my favorite unplanned stops of this entire road trip. This wonderfully kooky purveyor of fine spirits wants their bar and tasting room to be an experience unto itself, and everything is designed in a way that can only be described as a speakeasy hidden in a circus tent. The art everywhere is playful and strange, and when I walked in they were playing Tom Waits’ Chocolate Jesus over the radio so I knew right away I’d found a place that was made for me. You can see a cute walkthrough of the brother/sister team that founded the place describing their aesthetic choices and training here.
Luckily, the place isn’t just a looker and the booze all lives up to the high quality of the art direction. Right now they have house rum, vodka, gin, and moonshine and they’re working on aging some of that moonshine up into fine bourbons and whiskeys but they’re still pretty new to the game. I also got an inside scoop from the super friendly and funny bartender that they were working on a special honey schnapps that was like a whiskey distilled from mead and then barrel aged that sounds pretty amazing. To make actually visiting the tasting room even more of a special experience, they work on creating really unique cocktails that show off the versatility of their spirits and the imaginations of their bartenders. Their menu is designed like a circus play-bill (obviously) and it’s broken up between accessible classic cocktails, more complex ones, and downright unusual ones. I naturally had to pick from the last category and went with the Dan Castello which was a Moonshine Old Fashioned, but then finished with cold brew coffee and garnished with cinnamon and a marshmallow toasted before your eyes for theatrical flair. It was a delicious blend of rich and roasty flavor from the coffee, hints of fruitiness and aroma from the cinnamon and bitters, and a clean crisp boozy finish from that pure local moonshine. It was one of the best cocktails I’ve ever had, and I can’t recommend this place enough.
To reenergize myself for the rest of the day’s driving, I got some more non-moonshine filled coffee from the wonderfully named coffee shop The Bourgeois Pig, which had good coffee and fun punk vibes, which both made me very happy.
After coffee, my last stop near Casper was an absolutely incredible piece of natural weirdness known as Hell’s Half Acre. While it’s actually 320 acres as opposed to just one half, it does live up to the Hellishness of the name with fiery colored sandstone and sharply jagged rock formations that surge out of the deep ravines in striking random patterns. It’s so otherworldly looking that it was actually used for most of the exterior shots of the fictional planet Klandathu in Paul Verhoeven’s fantastic Starship Troopers, a movie so superficially stupid that many critics didn’t notice that it might be one of the smartest satires of the military industrial complex ever committed to film. Truly it’s such a tonally off the wall movie, that it could have only come from the high art/trash sensibility of the director of Robocop, Showgirls, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct. It was neat getting to see where it was filmed, but even better to really see the full scope of this truly insane vista.
From there it was another 3 hour drive to my Air BnB for the night which was at campgrounds in the small town of Shell. I had never heard the term glamping before, but apparently it’s a portmanteau of glamorous and camping, and that was how this particularly spot was advertised. I kind of hate the term, but I loved this beautiful and unique Air BnB that was in a massive tent with a fully furnished bedroom and better functioning wifi than all the roads I took to get their (I had a few sort of scary GPS blackouts where I had to actually rely on my own sense of direction, yikes!). It was sort of in the middle of nowhere so I just committed to spending the remainder of the night writing in comfort and watching the Steve Martin and Martin Short special on Netflix, where two of my favorite comic actors totally punch below their weight but still deliver a charming and entertaining hour with flashes of occasional brilliance.
The best part of the whole experience though was getting to watch the sunset over my the little river behind my tent. I’ve never seen the sky so perfectly clear or that particularly rich shade of indigo. What could be better than that?
Favorite Random Sightings: a town called Chugwater (a healthier form of chugging to be sure); another town called Wheatland (because that is all that is there); Red paved highways (stylish); a sign saying “This project is funded with one cent tax dollars” ( that can’t be right, just mathematically); a restaurant called Eggingtons; Cowboy Scrubs (I don’t know if they sell cleaning supplies for cowboys or medical wear for cowboys); Crazy Pedaler (an insane name for a bike shop); a really bizarre advertisment for a place “Where the Cowboys go sneaking”; Poison Spider Road (what an absolutely terrifying street name); a BBQ place with the hilarious ad “You're gonna need a bigger pig”
Regional Observations: I couldn’t take pictures of these because I was driving but luckily the internet was able to provide some good photos of the many tunnels on Wyoming highways that straight up go through mountains. I’ve never seen so many of these in my life and it made for some of the most surreal driving I’ve ever done.
Albums Listened To: Try for the Sun (Disc 2) by Donovan; Tuba City by Bim Skala Bim (a fun ska album with disappointingly few tubas on it); Tumblin’ Dice 7” by the Gaslight Anthem (a solid Rolling Stones cover, with a hell of an original B-Side); Tupelo Honey by Van Morrison (an underrated classic)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
One from the internet:
What do you call someone who can’t stick with a diet?
A desserter.
Songs of the Day:
some hard rocking goofiness
really tender
For someone who puts so much emotion in his vocals, Van has such hilariously un-energetic stage presences. Luckily his suit and the band make up for it in this killer performance
A beautiful song, but if you skip to 4:40 you get one of the most insane line readings in music history and it makes me laugh every single time