Road Trippin' Utah

Craig and I wanted to take a road trip during March. We decided on Yellowstone—after which we discovered that there is only one open entrance to Yellowstone in March and that is on the Montana side. This would have added approximately 17 hours of driving time to our three day trip. In the words of Strong Bad “beleted”.

We decided instead to road trip through Utah. Not my most favorite place in the world—that’s where I went to college. They were not the best four years of my life. All of this aside, the mountains in Utah are absolutely breathtaking, astonishing, enchanting, and other similar adjectives.

Friday night we drove as far as we could without falling asleep at the wheel which turned out to be right near the Great Salt Lake. Considering the number of times we’ve been to Utah, it seemed a bit pathetic that neither Craig nor I had seen the Great Salt Lake. We decided to make our way to Antelope Island (in said lake). The bad news was that Antelope Island closes at dark (I wish I would have known this before driving several miles off of the freeway). Grrr. In the end, we parked Copper in a church parking lot which was near the entrance to Antelope Island. Free lodging—I’ll take it. The next morning, we looked from a great distance at the Great Salt Lake and called it good. We then were followed through town by a really creepy cop who circled around the Wal-Mart parking lot the entire time we were buying chocolate milk. Saturday morning, we met up with Craig’s friend Joe, and spent a great hour and a half or so at Starbucks catching up. Well, Joe and Craig caught up—there wasn’t much catching up for me to do seeing as how it was my first time meeting Joe. (I know how much you appreciate my irrelevant details.)

Craig and I then screwed around for several hours in Salt Lake and Park City. We tried to take Copper to visit her last owner but she wasn’t home, after which we took the back road from Park City to Provo which was gorgeous. The mountains were, as I said before, incredible.
After trying to find a legitimate campground (they were all closed until April) we found some random place to park our bus in Provo Canyon and camped free for the second night in a row. We hiked through the snow up to a lovely waterfall and got some nice R&R in Copper.
Sunday morning was spent showing Craig around BYU campus—he was surprisingly interested in my tour. His presence also minimized the inevitable self esteem drop that happens when I am in Provo. Sunday afternoon we caught up with Chris and his wife—another one of Craig’s friends which was really fun. Those boys have some hilarious stories.

After getting caught in a nasty ice storm, we found lodging in another church parking lot in Brigham City on Sunday night which made our trip entirely lodging free. Hooray! The nice thing about Utah was that we could be really picky about finding a church parking lot. We rejected three in Brigham City (keep in mind, neither of us had ever been in this city before and we had neither maps nor directions, we just wandered aimlessly) before we found a parking lot we found to be adequate. We also found the most gorgeous tabernacle I've ever seen (the pictures don't do any kind of justice).
Monday we headed to Lava Hot Springs, but before actually arriving, we found Maple Grove Hot Springs which was off of highway 30. It was a few miles off of the road and we’d never been there, but it turned out to be pretty nice and we had the place to ourselves. It also afforded us the opportunity to take a hot shower. (Oh sweet cleanliness!) That’s one thing I love about the mountain west--there are hot springs aplenty.
Next up on the road trip docket: Sasquatch Music Festival in May. (Yippee!)