America 2009

Central Salt Lake City

The first thing anyone thinks of when they hear "Salt Lake City" is of course Mormons and/or their temple. So I felt it was only right we go visit it. Luckily there was a free shuttle from our campground to Temple Square so we took that. I was worried the tours would cost money, but everything was free there… soon became clear why.

The shuttle bus is run by the church, and when we arrived they showed us the way to our tour guides, who were also of the Mormon church. The guides were all females, 21-24 years old, and always in pairs. Turns out this is part of their "mission" work. The young males go off to distant places to door knock, and the females, it appears, are turned into tour guides.

We were given a fairly quick tour of their extensive campus. One of the people in our group was determined to pick a fight with them and had done his homework on every little flaw in their religion (which honestly isn't hard…) but came across as a bit of a rude prat...

Salt Lake City Fish

On a whim we decided to check out the Salt Lake City Aquarium, in Sandy. My GPS too us straight there, even if I did try and out smart it by avoiding a few left hand turns (read: the tricky turns when you drive on wrong side of road, and have to cross 4 lanes of traffic!). We arrived there soon enough, and you'll have to forgive me if I was a bit sceptical. The building looked like a giant blue warehouse surrounded by parking lots, and there was a school bus there too. But for $8 each… why not.

All fears were gone as soon as we entered the aquarium; it is really, really well done. Beats SF hands down in many areas. The exhibits are well thought out, with informative but concise (and quite stylish) info panels. The tanks are more like little windows into other worlds. The electric eel has a zap-o-meter above it, which lights up from green to red as it hunts for food, depending on whether it's search-shocking or stun-shocking.

And the exhibits… wow! The ...

Salt Lake City Animals

First trip in SLC was to the zoo. We were woken bright and early by train horns and traffic that sounded like it was mere metres from us… turns out the KOA campground (or "Kampground" as they would say) had put all the tent sites down the noisiest boundary. Great.

Zoo itself was easily found. While it isn't quite up to the same standard as San Francisco Zoo, it is still a cut ahead of Orana Park and their cats collection is simply amazing. We saw an ocelot, foxes, Black Footed Cat (and kittens),

 

… various reptiles and birds…

… tigers, a bat eared fox, and a wolf!

 

The wolf was really cute, jus...

US Highway 50

Nevada is a big state, and there are, more or less, only two ways to go from one side to the other: Interstate 80, or US Highway 50. We took 50, the so called “loneliest highway in America”. What a drive!

Lake Tahoe to Carson City

Left Tahoe Vista in the morning and drove round the lake, quickly crossing into Nevada (with ensuing flurry of border casinos).

  Lookout point on edge of Lake Tahoe / Cruising down towards Carson City

Soon we were climbing up over the Sierra Nevadas again on our approach to Nevada. More amazing scenery; mountainous, rocky, pine forests. Very different to NZ.

Carson City to Austin

Soon we were passing through Carson City and onto US 50. It took a while to become ‘lonely'’; dual lanes of 4wds isn’t quite what I’d call lonely! But in the shortest gap of time we were on a tiny little highway, straight as far as the eye can see, not...

Goodbye San Fran, hello Nevada

3rd Sept

Goodbye San Francisco. Left the hotel and lugged our luggage up the road to the National car rental office. Waited in the queue for one and a half hours. No exaggeration. No seats to sit on, was in the sun for part of it, was not fun. Finally got to the desk and handed over my reservation number. Clerk tapped away and produced a form for me to sign at 150% the quoted rate, for 2/3rds of the required time. So I dug my heels in and insisted that they honour my online reservation. Ended up asking to see a manager because the guy I was dealing with was so useless. Anyway another 45 minutes later I had my car at the correct rate and we were off.

It’s a nice car, a Hyundai Sonata with all sorts of whizz bang features. All those features don’t make understanding the California road code any simpler though. Example: the first traffic light I came to was a flashing red light. Great. But we set off and before I knew it was hurtling across the Golden Gate Bridg...