Salt Lake City to Idaho Falls, Idaho

As we were leaving the Peery Hotel in Salt Lake City, we saw a motorcyclist packing his bags in the car park. I couldn't believe how much he was endeavouring to stuff inside the small panniers on each side of his bike. How lucky we are to have a large car to carry all our belongings with us!

Anyway, we got into conversation with Jean, a Canadian, who travels the world on his bike and is next year intending to go to Chile. We talked about our drive there in 2001, when we did the Inca Trail. He told us about his trip to India and Nepal. It was a fun few minutes and to end, we took a photo of him with his bike and he took one of us all in front of Bob's car.

Good luck and safe travels, Jean Roux. Maybe we will meet again - who knows?

Jean all packed up and about to go.

We left the hotel at about 10.30am and drove about twenty miles to the shore of the Great Salt Lake. It is like an ocean! We walked down to the lake and I tasted the salty water. There is so much salt in the water that, when you swim, you float to the surface, very much like swimming in the Dead Sea.

 

We had parked in the car park of Saltair, which was once a very popular health resort but, after two fires and being left derelict for many years, it is now used for concerts and weddings.

The interior of this once grand building is now a vast cavern with a giant staircase that looked to me totally out of place!

 

We left Saltair after about half an hour and started our drive north on Interstate 15. After about twenty miles, we saw an aircraft museum with military planes parked in the open outside the museum's hangars. We pulled off the freeway to visit Hill Aerospace Museum, located at Hill USAF base. What an incredible collection of planes and weaponry it has.

It even had an atomic bomb, the Mk 6. I presume it was empty!!

One plane that really caught my eye was the spy plane SR-71, the Blackbird, which was the successor to the U2 shot down over Russia in the 1960's.

 

Outside there were planes of all types, including this B1 bomber....

... and this B52, infamous for its bombing raids over Laos, Cambodia and North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

We had a very interesting hour at the museum before we started the drive north again.

We came up behind this FedEx truck pulling TWO trailers - quite a sight and I wonder how the driver manages to reverse the vehicle with two trailers behind him?

After a further 100 miles, we came to the border with Idaho, our fourth state of the drive and the first of the thirteen we haven't visited before. Eagle-eyed followers of the blog will have seen that I have changed the title from 'Thirteen to Go' to 'Twelve to Go'! Tomorrow, we will be able to tick off two more from the list - Montana and Wyoming.

We reached our destination for the day, Idaho Falls, at about 3pm. We found a good Best Western Hotel close to the banks of the Snake River, which runs through the centre of the town. We took a walk along the river and came to the falls that the town is named after. They are a very impressive sight. There is the longest weir I have ever seen. The water cascades over it for about a quarter of a mile. The weir is part of a large hydro-electric scheme.

Across the Snake River is another Mormon Temple that has apparently been recently refurbished.

We walked back to the hotel and phoned Kenny to find out where they all were. He told us that they had gone to Rexburg, a town 25 miles farther on by mistake and were now driving back to Idaho Falls. They had taken back roads from Salt Lake City.

We have now driven over 1,600 miles, which is just under one quarter of the total drive. Tomorrow, we head for one of the highlights of the trip, Yellowstone National Park. We have heard there has been quite a lot of snow in the park, but the road we are using to enter the park is definitely open to traffic.