Welcome to Wyoming: Hiking Medicine Bow Peak + exploring Laramie

It looks like a screensaver. This is ridiculous. Today is going to be awesome. Heck yeah. So who knew that we would try two of the more unique food items we've ever had in Laramie, Wyoming of all places. Welcome to Wyoming. We drove eight hours from Amarillo, Texas up here to Wyoming last night and oh my gosh, it is amazing. This place is awesome. We've only seen it in the daylight for about 30 minutes, but we're just already in love. It's a nice cool morning. We have our jackets on. We're wearing jackets and pants. I have my sweat pants on. It's just awesome. It's so nice to not be hot. We slept so well last night because we woke up and it was like 40 degrees outside. It was the best. So we're in this area of Wyoming called the Snowy Range Scenic Byway. I'm really struggling to remember that. We're at a place called Lake Marie. You basically just park and then walk like a one second path to this lake and it's gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. So this area is really cool because it's a really, it's a scenic road that connects two different highways in Wyoming. So if you want to take the scenic route, you can go this way. There's hiking, awesome views. It's just absolutely magical. Yep and speaking of hiking, we're about to go on a hike here in a little bit, but first breakfast and coffee with a view and now we're ready. Woo! So this area is the Medicine Bow National Forest and today we're going to hike up to Medicine Bow Peak and there's three different ways you can get up there and we're going the hardest way which is also the shortest way and that's why we're doing it because it's shorter. So it's 3.2 miles. It's just the standard Medicine Bow Peak trail and it starts from Lewis Lake. Unfortunately our van could not fit in the parking lot so we're having to walk a but I can't, we can't complain. It is gorgeous here. Magnificent day. We just can't stop smiling. It's just awesome. We've missed the mountains so much. For sure. It's so beautiful out here. This is ridiculous. Today's gonna be awesome. Heck yeah. So the trail starts out, I'm slipping, the trail starts out really flat when you're going around the lake but knowing that this is like a short and steep trail, that's always a bad sign because you know it's gonna get brutal and we're starting to, we're starting to go up. We think we see where we're going but I'm not 100% sure but let's just say it's very rocky. All right looks like we found the hard part of the trail. We have 0.8 miles left and we heard there was a boulder field to climb and it looks like we got there. It's good though. It's a good workout for us because we have a big backpacking trip coming up in a couple weeks and this is going to be great to prep us. This is not easy. We're at like 11,700 feet of elevation right now. Coming from Austin, it's a very large jump so it's pretty hard for that reason but it's an awesome hike. Loving it. We're pretty close. I just looked at the map. We have like one more, one or two more switchbacks and then straight up so we're getting there. We did it. We made it. We're at the top. Not gonna lie. I did not really enjoy the last part of this trail because it was all rock scrambling and some of the rocks are super sturdy and then some kind of wobble and jiggle and make a scary noise when you step on them so I just felt a little uneasy at times. It was fun. It was just, it made me a little nervous I guess. I enjoyed it. It was a fun hike. That's kind of my style. I like just like powering up. If you go too slow you lose your balance and stuff like that so I just like trucking up. I will say though with hikes like this and we said this during Camelback Mountain in Arizona during that vlog but like when you actually have to like really focus hard on like where your hands and your feet are going it makes the hike more bearable. You're not focusing so much on the elevation so I will say that was a good thing but views are killer. 10 out of 10. So we caught the sunrise this morning at that farthest lake over there but man it's just like boom boom boom boom boom all these little lakes like really as far as you can see there's some way over there, way over there. It's just gorgeous piece of the country. And down we go. All right we made it back down from the trail. The hike was a blast and we highly recommend it. It was so much fun and even though I didn't love the top part because it was a little scary I still would would do it again. I have no regrets. I highly recommend it still even though it freaked me out a little bit. I will say you don't have to go all the way up to get awesome views so if you're nervous like me or you're just tired or short on time you can go like halfway up and still see pretty much the whole view just a little bit lower down. Yeah and a bonus all the people along the trail I don't know if they're from Wyoming or not whatever but they were super nice and there's lots of doggos. Oh we saw so many dogs half of them ignored 90% of them ignored us but that's okay they were still really cute. And now we're off to Laramie. Laramie is the third largest city in Wyoming. It's about 45 minutes to an hour away from where we were just hiking but it's probably most famous for being home to the University of Wyoming. Yeah and we're here just in time it's the first full weekend of college football so everybody's walking around yeah go hook them horns everybody's walking around in their yellow shirts but the funny thing is they're playing Missouri or Mizzou and so we don't know who's who. Yeah because both teams are yellow so we're like wow look at all these people in yellow and then we realize like half of them have Mizzou stuff on so we don't know but there's a lot of yellow going on in this town today and it's a really cute town so far the buildings are super cute there's a lot of murals on the wall so we're gonna walk around grab a bite to eat and just check it out. We are waiting for our table at a restaurant that has a very unique dish that's something we've never tried and it sounded really delicious so we're gonna wait it out and hopefully get to try it in front of this place called knight heron bookstore and coffee house and it's really cool on the inside i think it's all used books and the walls are just lined with books and they also serve coffee so we just got some iced chai's or dirty chai's i guess because we got espresso in them to hopefully caffeinate us for our long drive once we leave the town. I think this is going to be worth the wait we are at crow bar and grill and we heard they had a unique item on the menu and it is the pad thai fries so it's fries with all the ingredients for a pad thai which is like peanuts and the sauce and like green onions and lime and oh it looks so good we just came in just for the fries but then we were looking at the menu and we saw this burger called the king burger which now that we think about it it's like elvis style burger so it's a with with cheddar bananas peanut butter and bacon what the i'm excited for this so who knew that we would try two of the more unique food items we've ever had in laramie wyoming of all places that sauce is good all right let's give it a shot at the richmond night market in vancouver a few months ago now we've had pad thai fries what's next orange chicken fries we're on the hunt for it now time to see what the king burger is all about it's on the menu don't doubt it and i'm really intrigued to see what this is gonna taste like it's really good it's a really good combination of like sweet and savory i'm digging it i like the like kind of melted peanut butter on top with the banana so laramie took us by surprise it was a cool little town didn't hurt that we were here on college game day and that's kind of our goal when we're traveling around is to find these little hidden gems that not a lot of people might travel to so yeah so we can't wait to find more little towns across the u.s that you know whether you're just passing through or you want to actually spend time here like we kind of help you find different places you can go while you're there so this is laramie is really close to colorado so if any of you guys live in colorado you should definitely come up here spend a weekend like camping and hiking come into town grab some food so we're back on the road and it feels like all we've been doing is driving yeah but we had we had thought we'd be on the road a month sooner than we are so we're kind of trying to rush to get to where we really wanted to end up and spend a lot of the summer so hopefully after we get to this next stop we'll actually kind of settle down for a bit and drive less and actually like stay in one spot for a little bit so that's the hope so we're headed a little bit north to a place you may have heard of grand teton yellowstone yeah maybe can't wait to check out some more national parks