Welcome to Part Two!

After our exciting journey into Utah we arrived at Salt Lake City with the lovely Kim and Leoni. Temperatures were not warm in Salt Lake City, but we found the house with no problems and were warmly welcomed! This welcome continued when we went to visit some friends for an amazing Thanksgiving Dinner, where one of our preconceptions about Utah was quickly smashed. We assumed that alcohol would be pretty difficult to get hold of, and that everything would be very conservative and respectful of Mormonism, so we were surprised and impressed by our first beer…

As well as the excellent label it’s also a relatively high percentage, at 6%. Generally in America you can buy beer below 3% at supermarkets and general shops, but for anything more alcoholic than this you need to go to actual liquor stores.

But anyway, on with Thanksgiving! The food was unbelieveable, and plentiful enough to feed us all three times over. We had all the staples – delicious Turkey, Corn Casserole, Green Bean Casserole, Stuffing, Pumpkin Pie and many more! I ate so much that I may have actually blacked out, memory is patchy and you can bet that we weren’t on the ball enough to take any pictures… But rest assured, very good times were had! We followed all this eating with a highly competitive game of Cranium, which Team Channon + Tim were leading before it was abandoned when it became clear that none of us were skilled enough to actually complete it.

 

We tried so hard, oh how we tried, but honestly we weren’t even close. We chose to blame the cultural differences, even though we were playing the English version. Possibly the altitude was also a factor.

Anyway, we had amazing fun playing and are definitely indebted to our lovely hosts!

The following day we went on an exciting day of sightseeing around Salt Lake City, hosted again by the fabulous Kim and Leoni. We saw Temple, which is the centre of the Mormon Church as well as the kind-of centre of Salt Lake City. It’s not geographically in the middle, but all of the roads are named outwards from Temple, so heading south from Temple the roads are South Temple, 100 South, 200 South, 300 South, etc… This is extremely useful if you want to know where Temple is, but very confusing for us tourists trying to figure out where we are and don’t know the system, since 100 South will actually run East to West and so on. Anyway, Temple!

You cannot tour around inside the Temple, but the outside was lovely enough and there was a lot to see on the grounds, including this excellent statue of Jesus looking majestic:

After this we went to see the Salt Lake, specifically Antelope Island which is a State Park to the South East of the Lake. We were warned that the Salt Lake can smell a little ripe, but we thought this was definitely worth it to see the Bison and Antelope on the island as well as the famous lake itself! It was still extremely cold, but we had a lot of fun walking around some areas and driving around the bigger loop to go Bison seeking. Here is Rob looking chilly in front of the lake:

Needless to say we retreated quickly to the nice warm car and started the drive, where we saw many exciting animals! The most exciting was Mr Bison:

But we also saw Antelopes, Coyotes, Deer and many more! Very exciting times. We stayed until it got dark, so we got to see a very beautiful sunset over the Salt Lake which our camera completely failed to fully capture:

We returned home for some very delicious pizza and an excellent few rounds of the baffling Dominion with our hosts before an early night ready for the excitement to come.

Saturday was a big day, and we knew that we needed to be strong. We dressed up in a thousand layers and headed into the mountains for *skiing!!* 🙂

I’ve never skied before but Rob is pretty excellent at it so rather than bothering an instructor I forced my lovely husband to teach me the ways of the snow. This was not straightforward, partly because we didn’t realise that there was a beginner slope so dived straight into a very tall but relatively easy slope. It was a long way up, and a very long time to successfully get back down! Much fun was had, and I at least looked the part!

It’s hard to say whether riding up the ski lifts, sliding back down, or possibly even the crashing, was the most fun! We didn’t even notice the frosty -10oC temperature 🙂

We skied hard for many hours with our mad skills, before retreating back to the house for very warm showers and general recovery!

Luckily we had a gentle Sunday of driving back from Salt Lake to Fort Collins via Wyoming, so we could relax our painful limbs in the car! Despite everyones assurances that there was nothing of any interest on the drive, it was actually very beautiful. We didn’t see any of the famous wild horses but the landscape was snow covered and you could see for miles, so we were very impressed!

We finally arrived home about 6.30pm on the Sunday, ready for very early bedtimes all round! We’re now eagerly planning our next road trip, so trying to figure out what sights we need to see that are vaguely nearby. Recommendations very welcome!

I hope you enjoyed our adventures, more posts to follow as soon as we do something interesting!

Cat & Rob xx