A Blog Along The Lincoln Highway

The third stop on the bus tour is at a barn on the eastern edge of Lyman, Wyoming. It’s not until we’re in town that I recognize this as the home of the Diamond Club, a little old bar where we stopped and talked to the owner/bartender last summer. We don’t have time to be social today.

The big white barn is a recently rehabbed old structure, the Lyman Experimental Farm. All three busses and the various tagalong vehicles (like us) unload, and everybody eats in the hall on the second floor. The room is big, the barn’s structure exposed and beautifully restored.

The chicken salad sandwiches, fruit salad and macaroni salad are tasty too.

After lunch, people are invited to go and see an original concrete 1928 Lincoln Highway marker in the adjacent field. It’s still in its original location. We had shot it last summer, so no need to go over there now.

I want to consider an interview or two here in the parking lot. Buddy and Bob on their motor-trikes are nowhere to be seen. Cameraman Bob says the light is all wrong, too strong, too directly overhead. We eventually figure out a way to get one interview done.

Then the buses load up and we’re moving on eastward again out of Lyman. We make a left off the paved road onto an old stretch of the Lincoln that parallels 80 for a while, then cuts underneath the interstate and along a slightly northern route to the weird geological formations known as Church Buttes.

Mormon pioneers stopped at these striking sandstone formations, and they prayed here. In awe. We stop because this was a memorable old tourist attraction on the Lincoln Highway, and it’s pointed out that if you look in the scrub grass on the other side of the road, you can see the foundation for an old family run gas station called Naggi’s. The bases for the old gas pumps are still there too.

We hang around for a while after the buses leave. Bob is fascinated by the huge eagle’s nest that’s up high on the one end of the Buttes. “That is the biggest nest I’ve ever seen,” he says. It’s a beauty.