September 7. We got breakfast in Park City, then I drove Grace around to some of the neighborhoods where I have been looking at real estate…mostly on line, but also in person. Hard to believe that it had only been 5 weeks earlier that I’d been out here. That week in late July, our nephew Jim had not yet been diagnosed with a relapse of his leukemia, and now he was gone.
The leaves had already started to turn, as you can see from the faint red in the trees below.
Grace didn’t have much patience for looking at neighborhoods, so we finished a load of laundry at the Mitchells and got on the road. (We almost accidentally left the cooler of now-stinky dumplings and Kimchi in the Mitchells’ refrigerator, which would have been an unwelcome house gift for them to return to months from now.)
Once we reached Salt Lake City, I told Grace just to stay on 80 West for hundreds of miles. Then I started in on a brief that I had been neglecting. Quite a bit later, Grace said, “Am I still on 80 West?” In fact, she was not. Near the airport, she had needed to take an exit to stay on 80. I guess it wasn’t obvious, and I wasn’t watching. She blamed me for being a bad navigator and I blamed her for being clueless about where she was driving. It was frustrating because we had gone at least 20 miles out of the way, almost to Ogden. We had to turn around and head back to the junction with 80 West, bickering the entire way about whose fault it was.
This time we really did stay on 80 West for hundreds of miles. The salt flats are really odd, with piles of salt that look like snow on the sides of the roads.
We wondered what this strange sculpture-like thing was doing on the side of the road:
We were pretty nervous for a good part of this stretch, because there were no gas stations for literally 100 miles, and we should have gotten gas before starting out on the flats. You would think there would be a sign saying “Last Gas for 100 miles.” But there wasn’t, and we sweated it. We finally got gas in West Wendover, right over the border in Nevada, where the casinos started. There were even slot machines in the rest stop.
Nevada was disappointing to drive across. Very barren, interrupted by unattractive towns like this one where we stopped for coffee.
Around about Reno, it was getting dark and I didn’t want to push on toward Lake Tahoe unless we knew we had a hotel room. Grace found us a room at the Granlibakken, which sounded odd. We pulled in around 8 pm and drove around the rather vast grounds endlessly in the pitch dark trying to find the reception area (in the morning we discovered that if we had taken the correct fork in the road it would have been very obvious). Never mind; we eventually found the reception building and our room, and we had a late dinner at a cute tavern back on the main road.