Day 12 - Salt Lake City

We woke up early and loaded up for Salt Lake City. With a tour along the Riverwalk in Sacramento, some interesting stories about the Donner family and Cannibalism as we hit Donner Pass (thanks, Mark) we then headed to Reno for our first stop of the day. Of course, you can’t go to Reno and not hit the casinos, so we hit up Circus, Circus for a family friendly cruise through its midway. Unfortunately, Reno doesn’t run on Richmond time so we were 2 hours early for any Circus shows, but the girls were entranced by the bright flashing lights and Mark and I were shocked at the number of people gambling so early in the morning…many of which it seemed had not quit from the previous evening. It really lived up to its name as “the biggest little city in the world.” A big feel, all packed into a few city blocks. We saw lots of kids starting their gambling careers early in the Midway though. J 

We then headed through Nevada. It is quite possible that Nevada rivals Nebraska for the most boring state to drive through. We were super excited to see the “Welcome to Utah” sign. We stopped off at the Bonneville Salt Flats and were amazed at the lack of vegetation and miles of salty, flat land. Standing on the flats you could feel the heat rising off the salt. They created some interesting mirages giving us the feeling as though there was water all around us. 

Running to the water...oh, wait. That's a mirage. :)

We continued through Utah (super fun when somebody needs a restroom and the next stop is 60 miles away) and slowly we could see the mountains approaching. We stopped off at Great Salt Lake which was huge, and 5x more salty than the ocean, but not quite what we were expecting. With the high concentration of salt, fish can’t tolerate the stress of the salinity so only brine shrimp, brine flies and algae are very prominent around the lake which left it feeling very dirty as the flies were everywhere and the smell along the black, muddy beaches was quite strong. 

We continued on into Salt Lake City to Sugar House. We met my cousin at Sugar House Park to let the girls run off some steam and catch up. It was nice to see Katie and her husband and hear all about their SLC life. We ate a little dinner in Sugar House (this place has so many cute little pubs and restaurants) and then we drove around downtown SLC to check out some sights. 

Emma couldn't swing straight...she kept checking out the moutains all around her. That's what the Midwest does to a kid! :)

 Salt Lake City is such a beautiful city with so many things to do. Since we had a pretty long drive today (and another really long drive tomorrow) we decided to front-load our awful driving day and instead of staying in Salt Lake City for the night as we had planned, we put the girls in their pj’s and decided to drive until we couldn’t handle it to make our next day to Estes Park, CO better. We made it a few more hours to Rock Springs, WY and pulled into a hotel about 1AM to stretch out for the night. 

Of course, not before giving SLC a real tour. We stopped to see Temple Square, Cathedral of the Madeline, the Utah Capitol building, the Church History Museum, and Trolley Square. I think we hit the jackpot as although everything but Temple Square was closed, we got to see the beauty of these wonderful landmarks all lit up at night.