Five states in one day is a lot. I started the day in New Jersey, spent about an hour in Illinois, then landed in Utah and had a happy reunion with Jon. I was quite surprised to find it was 83 degrees in Salt Lake. From there, we had a really delicious lunch in a cafe in Ogden, even got to eat outside on the patio. Then we started driving north west through Utah and into Idaho.
Lots of farmland, lots of cows. I hereby take my metaphorical hat off to all our country’s farmers – that’s got to be hard life for some of these people. Some of the farms we passed you really can’t figure out how they manage to survive.
We passed some odd things along the way. My two favorites were the Museum of Clean, which apparently has the country’s largest collection of old vacuum cleaners. If Jon hadn’t been napping at that moment, I would have made him stop to visit. I swear that would have been one of the weirdest things I’ve ever come across. But the best one was a road sign, somewhere near the Utah – Idaho border, in a huge, flat valley full of farmland that read ‘Occasional Blinding Dust Storms’. Wish we could have gone back and taken a picture of that one.
We followed the Snake River for a pretty good chunk of the way. It’s still a huge and magnificent river but when you look at the surrounding hills and realize that once upon a geological time that river must have been 100 miles wide or bigger and how much it clearly altered the landscape, it was just awe inspiring.
After stopping at a seriously weird and kind of creepy rest stop and passing Boise in a bit of rainstorm, we entered Oregon. And I have to say eastern Oregon is seriously beautiful. The hills just kept getting bigger and bigger until finally we had to concede that they stopped being foothills and became actual mountains along the way. We finally landed in Baker City, Oregon, at a funky bed and breakfast where the innkeeper fed us cookies and we fell into bed, exhausted.
I’ll post some pics from the road later tonight. On to Mount Rainier today. It looks like a beautiful day, should be a great hike this afternoon.