Day 10 – Driving and Rocky Mountain National Park

After we left Salt Lake City, we drove to Junction City on Highway 80 and spent the night at Wal-Mart.  It was a little town next to Park City and was really cute.  We then headed toward home, taking Highway 40 toward Colorado. The road was one of the scenic highways, much like all the others we had been on.  ;)

   

We sure did this a lot, filling up with gas.  Most of the time we had to do 2 fill ups, because the pumps would stop at $100. 

Here are all the bugs that were on the front of the camper from our trip to Antelope Island.  They were a mess!    

We stopped at Dinosaur National Monument, there is one park on the Utah side and one on the Colorado side.  We stopped at both of them.  The only dinosaur bones were on the Utah side in a quarry, but they had the quarry closed, so we didn’t get to see anything.

These petroglyphics were on the walls of a rock in the park.  We told Kasey these were aliens. 

 

There was a lot of flooding in the area.

This is Steamboat Springs.

We then drove through Rabbit Ears Pass.  There was a lot of snow on the ground.

This is the rabbit ears, up on the top of the mountain.  Sorry the picture isn’t very good.

The other side of the pass was really pretty, the grass was green, no snow, lots of water.

This is Grand Lake in Colorado.

We headed into Rocky Mountain National Park, I really didn’t want to go, I figured it was going to be like all the other National Parks we had been to, more of the same, lots of mountains.  But it was quite an adventure, we saw probably 6 moose including a mother and baby.  We saw lots of elk.  But the big thing was heading up toward the top of the peak, it started snowing, there was tons of snow all over.  It really snowed hard, the roads weren’t really slick, but they were narrow with really steep hills on the sides.  We weren’t really sure we were going to make it out of there.  The high point was 12,000 feet high.  We crossed the continental divide.  As we were leaving the park, the park ranger was closing the road going up to the mountain.  I’ll have to look up how much snow they ended up getting.

To say the least, it was quite an adventure, we started in about 6:30 and made it out by 9:00.  It was a pretty fun adventure, after we got through it! 

 

These pictures didn’t really turn out well, but notice all the snow on the windshield! 

After we left the park, we went to Estes Park to spend the night, couldn’t find a campground or a Wal-mart, so we spent the night at the local hospital parking lot.  No one bothered us. 

I had a great time on vacation but will be really happy to get home.  I got to see a lot of things, not sure what I liked the best.  The drive through Rocky Mountain was pretty cool and Salt Lake City was neat. 

Day 9 – Wyland Wall, Temple Square and the Great Salt Lake

We stayed at Walmart last night in Richfield, Utah. I thought they were going to have a tornado, there was a storm brewing above the mountains and the wind was whipping around like crazy. The wind really blew the camper, but it didn’t last very long and everything was good.

We took a scenic route to Salt Lake City and our first stop was the Wyland Wall that was on the side of a furniture store building.

We then went to Temple Square. It was a little hard to find a parking spot for the camper, but found one about 8 blocks away and then walked to the square. It was a pretty amazing place. We couldn’t go in the temple, they reserve that for weddings and baptisms. They told us that they can have up to 100 weddings a day in the temple during June.

There was a lady that stopped and talked to us outside the temple, she gave us a brochure of the square and told us about all the neat things to see. There were two visitor’s center that they had at the square. Each one had different things in it.

This is the second visitor center we went in, which focused more on the building of the temple. They had a replica of the temple in there, along with interactive monitors that told you more about each section of the temple.

This is what the inside of the temple looks like.

 

This was the baptism area. We at first thought it was a milking parlor or something (I know, don’t laugh) but the cows actually held up the baptism tank. I am sure there was some symbolism there, but I didn’t really catch it.

We then went up in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, which was celebrating its 100 year anniversary of being built. It was a beautiful building also. We ate lunch on the top floor.

We then toured the Beehive house, where Brigham Young lived with his wife, Lucy. There were tour guide who took us through the house.

I really liked the woodwork in the house.  The beehive is the state symbol.

We then went to the Church Office building, which was 26 stories tall. We went up to the 26^th floor where they have an observation tower. My pictures didn’t turn out so great from that.

 

We also had a tour guide that took us up to the elevator and pointed out all the sites to us on the observation deck. There were two decks on the observation tower on each side of the building. The lady told us about some guys that they had left on the observation deck “who said they were taking pictures” and they parachuted off the top of the building. I want to look that up, can’t imagine doing that.

From there we went to Antelope Island on the Great Salt Lake. We drove 7 miles on a causeway that they had built to get to Antelope Island. There wasn’t really a lot to see and they said the gnats were really bad and biting so we didn’t even bother to get out. We saw a lot of buffalos.