The Great Dyal Vacation of 2004 (Day 14 Update)

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The Great Dyal Vacation of 2004 Trip Journal Entry #13: July 14th

We continued to trudge through our vacation; this time with another long driving day. For whatever reason (probably the fact that I guzzled two bit 20 oz. RockStar energy drinks) I got over the fact that I hadn' slept well the night before and did OK during the day. From Lubbock, we cut northwest to Farmington, New Mexico, which is not a direction I had ever gone before. New Mexico seems like a fine enough state, but by the time we're leaving it and crossing over into southern Colorado, I'm ususally quite sick of it.

Not only that, the "scenery" around Shiprock leaves something to be desired. I always used to laugh that US-666 ran right through there (and we usually spent several hours on it at this point as well.) For whatever reason, they've recently changed the number of that highway. I always thought the old number was quite appropriate. On the highway formerly known as 666 we came across some pretty nasty thunderstorms that continued to follow us at least as far as Green River Utah, by which point the scenery had dramatically improved.

There's a big set of mountains, as it turns out, right there by Green River that I haven't been able to figure out what the name is. My atlas didn't have them labelled, although a few of the individual peaks were named. My mom thought maybe they were the Blue Mountains? We stopped for gas there, anyway, watching the storm clouds finally start to pass us by, and I picked up another big energy drink. We also went to a Taco Bell and, get this, they had run out of ground beef. I've never heard of a Taco Bell running out of ground beef before, since it's the main ingredient of most of their menu. Anyway, they were subbing chicken for beef because it was going to take about 20 more minutes before their beef was ready. Alexander didn't do well with the chicken at all, and they ended up coming and giving him a beef taco for free to replace it later. Not that that was any better. The kids (and not just the kids) were pretty fed up with the whole traveling thing by then; they'd seen pretty much all the DVD's we'd brought several times and they were pretty sick of just sitting in the car. It helped a little bit that the older kids were riding with Grandma and Grandpa in the Grand Marquis, but in some ways that only made it worse for us with the younger kids and nobody but ourselves to help entertain them.

I had about had it as well, the caffeine started really wearing off on the next leg of the drive and the migraine from not enough sleep and staring out the windshield all day (again) was starting to set in. Luckily, at least, the scenery in this part of the Utah drive is really spectacular. We actually drove through a small corner of Arches National Park (not that we saw a whole lot from the road, but we did a little) but it was dark before we came all the way in. In fact, I think it's almost always dark when we hit Provo canyon, so I only got to admire being surrounded by mountains for about half an hour or so before it got too dark to see.

We ended up at a LaQuinta in Orem just off the Interstate. For some reason my mom thought we should all stay in the Provo area for the next few days as we geared up towards my brother's wedding. We said sure, Julie got online and got us great deals on hotels, and off we went. The problem is, it turns out we actually spent most of our time 45 minutes or so north in the SLC area. Not quite sure what we were thinking with the staying in Provo area, except that at least we knew the area fairly well. I was actually born in Provo, not that that helps (I also moved when I was one) but we'd been up to visit a fair amount, and Julie (who also only lived in Provo as an infant) for some reason really knows her way around town.

 

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The Great Dyal Vacation of 2004 Trip Journal Entry #14: July 15th

After again, attempting to sleep in for a while, we got up, got dressed and made our way out of the hotel. Our plan was, since it was the only day without any real things we "had to do" that we'd take the kids to downtown SLC and show them the touristy things, as well as try to go up Provo Canyon to Sundance or something, so the kids could see some real mountains, for the first time in living memory. Of course, by about the time we got to the "point of the mountain" where you go over a little pass-like feature and move from the Provo Valley to the Salt Lake Valley, we got a call on our cell phone from my family, who wanted to hook up with us. Turns out they didn't really have any plans other than hang around with Grandma and Grandpa (my dad's parents, and we wouldn't bring our kids to see them -- they're in their late 80s now) for an hour or two in the morning, so they were perfectly content to just piggyback on our plans. My youngest brother, though (the one getting married) recommended we check out Big Cottonwood Canyon rather than Provo Canyon, because we'd already done Provo and he thought the scenery was actually better going up Big Cottonwood anyway.

So, we got downtown, parked, and went to go see the Conference Center, which was closed because it was the 75th Anniversary of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (I think) and there was a big to-do about that. Barred on that front, we went to Temple Square across the street and poked around, showing the kids the temple, the visitor's centers, the brides wandering around all over the place getting their pictures taken, and all that good stuff. Lots of fun. Of course, being a Mormon family ourselves, it wasn't just touristy; there was a lot of stuff that had more meaning to that for us, so it was a great opportunity to teach the kids with some very nice visual aids, which is unusual.

We then went and got lunch at the food court in the ZCMI center mall; I had Schlotsky's because it's hard to get that here in Michigan (I have to drive 45 minutes to get to the one Schlotsky's in all of Metro Detroit; what's the deal? I thought like half of the population here was supposed to be of Polish descent...) Then family started wandering in; my parents, my sister, Joseph and his wife, and Samuel and his fiancé Vicki. We kicked around the mall a little bit; there was a pretty fun bookstore nearby that had Great Illustrated Classics(tm) books for $2 each, so we picked up a few for the kids to actually pick up a little culture. Although I think they went more for the War of the Worlds type of stuff than the Great Expectations fare, that's fine; so did I as a kid.

We then took the loop around to the north end of SLC and hopped off on Big Cottonwood Canyon, which truly was more scenic than Provo, in my opinion. Great, massive sheared walls of forested rock rose all around us as we wound through a narrow ribbon of a road, not daring to go more than about 40 mph due to the sharpness of the curves. We found a place to park at a little park (heh heh) area, then we hiked on a trail up to a waterfall; we went a good five miles, I'm guessing. The youngest kids were sleeping in the car with Grandma, who never did have much interest in that kind of thing. The older kids (Spencer and Jessica), on the other hand, thought it was one of the most exciting things they had ever done.

Later we went to the new apartment Samuel and Vicki were going to have, and then we decided to go to Black Angus because Samuel had some coupons. By this time, we had lost my parents and my sister, who was going to the airport to pick up Michael, Margaret and their baby Madeline. So Joseph, Brittany, Samuel, Vicki, and then Julie and I with our four kids all went and went into some kind of food shock; I've never had so much food in my life, I don't think. Not only did we not order anything for any of the kids, choosing to just feed them from our appetizer platters and parts of our entree, but we still had tons of food left over. Seriously, folks, the amount of food we bought for $30 was unreal. I don't know how those folks can continue to print those coupons.

Of course, by now it was late (and we were two time zones west, so it was really even later) so we finished off the day and went back to the hotel to sleep.