So as we learned last week, the barren nothingness that was South Dakota was only a warm up for the barren nothingness that would be Wyoming. The hundreds of miles of bushy weeds and ranchland gave me new appreciation for the lushness that is Lincoln County, Minnesota.
Understand, that I was still thoroughly enjoying myself, but what kind of blog would it be if I didn’t complain?
So, my hopes of getting a glimpse of Yosemite Sam never materialized on my sojourn across Wyoming. (Just a side note before we leave Wyoming…when you see those Verizon commercials on TV and the entire country is red except for an oblong stretch of white in Wyoming??? Yeah, I drove through most of that white.)
My spirits were jumpstarted as the “Welcome to Utah” sign stood out amongst the roadside brush. Certainly my stretch of endless Ponderosa was behind me. It’s no wonder the Cartwrights were always so crabby. (Sorry, that reference will only mean something to people late 40s and older.)
I wasn’t too far into Utah before I encountered my first of two bad weather events I would endure on the trip. Darkness had fallen and I was moving into the mountainous region just east of Salt Lake City. Several times I drove in and out of snow squalls and I got more than a bit nervous as they became longer in duration and more intense, making me rethink my plan to get as far as Salt Lake City before I stopped. A phone call home and I had Kathy and Lindsay looking for my next option for a hotel, and I ended up deciding to stay in Coalville for the evening.
When I was imagining how my trip would go before I left, I had visions of checking into my hotel each night and finding myself some good food before returning to my room, connecting to the internet to spend the evening answering emails, updating my family on the state of my problematic appendage and doing a little Facebooking. My Coalville stop at the Best Western was the start of bad luck for evening meals on the trip. The only other building in sight was the convenience store next door, and I ended up grabbing a blueberry muffin and a bag of Cheetos before heading into the hotel to check in.
The lady at the front desk told me she had a single room and said, “do you have an AARP card?” I looked around to see if anyone’s grandparents were checking in at the same time as me before realizing she was talking to me. I felt even worse when I realized I actually DID have an AARP card. “That will be $10 off,” she said.
She did NOT add, “…and by the way big boy, you don’t look old enough to be carrying an AARP card.”
My evening didn’t get any better when I got to my room. Despite following all the instructions and jumping through all the hoops, I COULDN’T CONNECT TO THE INTERNET!!!! I called the help line listed in the room info, and they told me they could not help me. (I resisted the urge to add the word “no” before the words “help line” in the hotel info.) I was told I had to have them reboot the router at the front desk.
So I trudged down to the front desk and she rebooted the router, to no avail. I still couldn’t connect. This issue actually ended up getting me another $10 knocked off the price of my room. Since the company was paying for my room, I would have gladly traded the $10 to be able to connect, but I resigned myself to digging into my spread of blueberry goodness and Cheetos and watch a rerun of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
I was living the good life.
At least I had an insulin shot in the leg and a lovenox shot in my stomach to look forward to…
Tuesday morning ushered in new excitement as the snow had cleared and the sun was shining brightly. That was good, because it was going to be a long drive to get to Tracy, California by evening.
So, I’m not really sure what my mind had imagined I would see in Utah, but again I was in for a surprise in just how underwhelmed I could be. Drop a load of Round-Up on Wyoming, and you have the scenery encountered in Utah. Miles and miles of…um…of…sandy-looking mushiness. If I were to have conjured a mental image of quicksand, that is exactly what I saw lining the roads of Interstate 80. This stretch is also named the Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway, no doubt because the lay of the land resembles old Ike’s desolate pate. (Again, those under 40, feel free to Google an image of our 34th President) I always assumed that the “salt flats” were a small area around some town named Bonneville, but the brown, watery blandness goes on for miles. If the pictures I’ve found online since my trip are any indic
ation, they may possibly turn white when they dry out in the summer.
Many miles of this bland panorama was suddenly interrupted about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City, when I came across an odd, colorful sculpture protruding on the horizon (pictured). With road signs threatening me that I wasn’t allowed to stop, I grabbed a drive-by, through-the-windshield photo of the peculiar monument. It wasn’t until I got home a few days later that I would do some research and find out what it actually was. I had no idea what it was called, or where to start looking, so I went to Google and typed the words “strange monument in Utah by interstate 80.”
It was the first link that came up.
My investigation revealed it was called “The Tree of Utah.” One site I was on said that it was built and installed “between 1982 and 1986.” So, apparently it was only about 25 years ago, but nobody actually wrote down the exact date that it was erected. Somebody apparently drove by it one day, hypnotized by hundreds of miles of salt flats, and said, “hey, when did they put that thing there?!!!”
And somebody anwered;
“Well, I guess it was probably mid-80s…I know it wasn’t there in ’81, and I remember I first noticed it just before Christmas in 1986.”
The website said it was built by a Swede named Karl, who built it to bring “bold color and beauty to the stark, flat, salty landscape.”
I, too, was startled at the vast stretch of nothing, but leave it to a Swede to actually stop and do something about it.
Next week…the ghosts of the Donner Party live on. (Google THAT one, kids, but not before you eat.)
Understand, that I was still thoroughly enjoying myself, but what kind of blog would it be if I didn’t complain?
So, my hopes of getting a glimpse of Yosemite Sam never materialized on my sojourn across Wyoming. (Just a side note before we leave Wyoming…when you see those Verizon commercials on TV and the entire country is red except for an oblong stretch of white in Wyoming??? Yeah, I drove through most of that white.)
My spirits were jumpstarted as the “Welcome to Utah” sign stood out amongst the roadside brush. Certainly my stretch of endless Ponderosa was behind me. It’s no wonder the Cartwrights were always so crabby. (Sorry, that reference will only mean something to people late 40s and older.)
I wasn’t too far into Utah before I encountered my first of two bad weather events I would endure on the trip. Darkness had fallen and I was moving into the mountainous region just east of Salt Lake City. Several times I drove in and out of snow squalls and I got more than a bit nervous as they became longer in duration and more intense, making me rethink my plan to get as far as Salt Lake City before I stopped. A phone call home and I had Kathy and Lindsay looking for my next option for a hotel, and I ended up deciding to stay in Coalville for the evening.
When I was imagining how my trip would go before I left, I had visions of checking into my hotel each night and finding myself some good food before returning to my room, connecting to the internet to spend the evening answering emails, updating my family on the state of my problematic appendage and doing a little Facebooking. My Coalville stop at the Best Western was the start of bad luck for evening meals on the trip. The only other building in sight was the convenience store next door, and I ended up grabbing a blueberry muffin and a bag of Cheetos before heading into the hotel to check in.
The lady at the front desk told me she had a single room and said, “do you have an AARP card?” I looked around to see if anyone’s grandparents were checking in at the same time as me before realizing she was talking to me. I felt even worse when I realized I actually DID have an AARP card. “That will be $10 off,” she said.
She did NOT add, “…and by the way big boy, you don’t look old enough to be carrying an AARP card.”
My evening didn’t get any better when I got to my room. Despite following all the instructions and jumping through all the hoops, I COULDN’T CONNECT TO THE INTERNET!!!! I called the help line listed in the room info, and they told me they could not help me. (I resisted the urge to add the word “no” before the words “help line” in the hotel info.) I was told I had to have them reboot the router at the front desk.
So I trudged down to the front desk and she rebooted the router, to no avail. I still couldn’t connect. This issue actually ended up getting me another $10 knocked off the price of my room. Since the company was paying for my room, I would have gladly traded the $10 to be able to connect, but I resigned myself to digging into my spread of blueberry goodness and Cheetos and watch a rerun of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
I was living the good life.
At least I had an insulin shot in the leg and a lovenox shot in my stomach to look forward to…
Tuesday morning ushered in new excitement as the snow had cleared and the sun was shining brightly. That was good, because it was going to be a long drive to get to Tracy, California by evening.
So, I’m not really sure what my mind had imagined I would see in Utah, but again I was in for a surprise in just how underwhelmed I could be. Drop a load of Round-Up on Wyoming, and you have the scenery encountered in Utah. Miles and miles of…um…of…sandy-looking mushiness. If I were to have conjured a mental image of quicksand, that is exactly what I saw lining the roads of Interstate 80. This stretch is also named the Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway, no doubt because the lay of the land resembles old Ike’s desolate pate. (Again, those under 40, feel free to Google an image of our 34th President) I always assumed that the “salt flats” were a small area around some town named Bonneville, but the brown, watery blandness goes on for miles. If the pictures I’ve found online since my trip are any indic
ation, they may possibly turn white when they dry out in the summer.Many miles of this bland panorama was suddenly interrupted about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City, when I came across an odd, colorful sculpture protruding on the horizon (pictured). With road signs threatening me that I wasn’t allowed to stop, I grabbed a drive-by, through-the-windshield photo of the peculiar monument. It wasn’t until I got home a few days later that I would do some research and find out what it actually was. I had no idea what it was called, or where to start looking, so I went to Google and typed the words “strange monument in Utah by interstate 80.”
It was the first link that came up.
My investigation revealed it was called “The Tree of Utah.” One site I was on said that it was built and installed “between 1982 and 1986.” So, apparently it was only about 25 years ago, but nobody actually wrote down the exact date that it was erected. Somebody apparently drove by it one day, hypnotized by hundreds of miles of salt flats, and said, “hey, when did they put that thing there?!!!”
And somebody anwered;
“Well, I guess it was probably mid-80s…I know it wasn’t there in ’81, and I remember I first noticed it just before Christmas in 1986.”
The website said it was built by a Swede named Karl, who built it to bring “bold color and beauty to the stark, flat, salty landscape.”
I, too, was startled at the vast stretch of nothing, but leave it to a Swede to actually stop and do something about it.
Next week…the ghosts of the Donner Party live on. (Google THAT one, kids, but not before you eat.)
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