LARAMIE lies fifty miles west of Cheyenne on I-80, or slightly further via the spectacular Happy Jack Road (Hwy-210), which slices through plains studded with bizarrely shaped boulders and outcrops. At first Laramie seems typical of rural Wyoming, but behind downtown's quaint Victorian facades lurk hard-rocking record stores, day spas, vegetarian cafés and secondhand bookstores - unusual for rodeo land, and due to the University of Wyoming , whose campus spreads east from the town center.

The centerpiece of the ambitious Wyoming Territorial Park , west of town at 975 Snowy Range Rd (mid-May to Sept daily 10am-6pm; $6), is the old territorial prison . A touch over-restored, it holds informative displays on the Old West and women in Wyoming, and huge mugshots of ex-convicts, among them Butch Cassidy, who was incarcerated here for eighteen months in 1896, for - as was the crime of most of the inmates - cattle-rustling.

The Wyoming Children's Museum and Nature Center at 412 S Second St (Tues-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat 10am-4pm; $2 for adults, $3 for kids; tel 307/745-6332) is a great hands-on experience, with gold panning, a crawl-through beaver lodge and some live reptiles. The University of Wyoming visitor center, 1408 Ivinson Ave (Mon-Fri 8am-5pm, Sat 9am-1pm; tel 307/766-4075), can direct you to several free museums and sights of interest on campus, including the Anthropology Museum, the Museum of Geology, the University Art Museum and the Rocky Mountain Herbarium.

Laramie

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