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.