Wyoming’s not a small state. It’s not as ridiculously large as Texas, but it’s big enough. And if you live in one corner and plan to go hunting in the opposite corner, you know you have a heck of a long drive ahead of you.
We do drive a lot in Wyoming. They get us used to it in school, with sports trips that take us from one side of the state to the other and back. When we have kids of our own in school, we chase the bus all over Wyoming during the sports seasons.
Technology has certainly made those long trips across the state more enjoyable. I’m not talking about self-driving cars or any of that crazy stuff. I just mean the ability to put all our Chris LeDoux albums into our phones, or even stream Chris’ entire collection of music from Amazon Music or iTunes. We used to have to swap out CDs, or before that, cassette tapes, when we’d heard a whole album. And if you’re as old as I am and had the good fortune to have a car with an eight-track player in it, you could have listened to your Chris LeDoux that way, too.
Now we don’t have to worry about getting to the end of the album. You can start listening in Cheyenne, go all the way to Buffalo, then drive back to Cheyenne without having to do anything other than drive and sing along.
I don’t know how many trips I’ve taken across Wyoming over the years, let alone all the long-distance road trips I’ve taken to other parts of the country. On more than a few of those drives, singing along with Chris was the only thing that kept me awake and safe. In my travels to other places far away, I’ve found a few people who had never heard of Chris LeDoux. My only question for them was, “what on earth do you listen to on long road trips?”
