Return Trip - Day 40 - Salt Lake City, UT

We found something better than a hotel that has free breakfast. Keep reading...

Eric today's knight at the keyboard. Another few hours on the highway and we found ourselves in Salt Lake City. We stopped at Shoshone Falls on the way... freezing and windy. Is this June? The guy at the entrance station, noticing our Massachusetts plates, said, "We wanted to make you feel at home." Carson said: "Ah, so you've been!" (The guy didn't hear him.) Anyway, Carson and I alternated driving along the way, and we (oh, OK, I) ignored Philip's advice and chatted the whole time about a variety of scintillating subjects. I did at one point bore Carson into unconsciousness, with a long sermon on politics, but he woke up energized. (I was driving at the time.)

Speaking of which, we met a lot of awfully friendly people as we strolled around Temple Square in Salt Lake, giving the Mormon Tabernacle and a couple of other buildings the standard tourist treatment. We drove up to see the Utah State House, and then kept driving, where we got great views down to the city, and since we found a baseball diamond, we tossed the wiffle ball around a little bit.

And where we are staying tonight might just be the best hotel of the trip so far. Of course it was free on our points, and of course it has free breakfast and a full kitchen and free Internet and free garage parking downtown, and of course they gave us free cookies and bottled water when we checked in... but this place also gave us free DINNER. "Herb-encrusted cod." Actually, it was very good. The complimentary red wine helped wash it down. And they call this a straitlaced town.

Today wasn't a biking day after all, but we're thinking that we'll hit the two-wheelers at Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado (especially since the visitor center is closed due to some sort of massive structural issue... oops).

[Carson: ps - we're inching closer to filling in that missing little gap in the blue line on the route tracker....]

Requested Superlatives
Most spiritual experience on journey westward: Lunch on Day 2 took place in Canaan, CT. It had been a very windy and rainy morning, and the magnitude of the quest was beginning to dawn on me for real. It was beginning to seem very daunting, and I began doubting the point of the trip. As I sat down in this small grassy patch off to the side of a long, tree-lined valley and opened up my lunch bag/made a phone call, the rain and wind stopped - the sun came out - cars stopped coming by - and things were perfectly still. A calm settled in on that valley, and I remembered that things aren't lived in the years, but in moments like that. I resolved to notice and appreciate the little, peaceful moments during the trip's rides.

Did you dip your tire in the ocean? No. We finished in Florence, OR, which is at Oregon Dunes National Park. The dunes are extremely steep and we decided to climb (read: tumble) down the dunes to the beach. When I wrote "Bike Trip '08" in the sand with a stone, I spiked the stone as a period as if it were the winning touchdown, and I think that was the best feeling of the entire trip - spiking the rock.