Mount Pleasant, Utah—September 14, 2024

Today we drove about 260 miles south from Pocatello, Idaho to Mt. Pleasant, Utah.  Mt. Pleasant is a small town about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City, and is just a stop over on the way to Moab, Utah, where we plan on spending spending the next few days seeing Arches National Park.  In case you are wondering, we aren’t just randomly driving around out here, although it does seem that way some days.  We are actually driving southeast towards home, but there’s a lot of meandering involved along the way.  Here’s a picture of Vanna hanging with the big girls at a rest stop in Utah today:  

This morning we ate breakfast at a local place called Abracadabras.  They had incorporated a magic theme into the decor—think black top hat light fixtures and silver cutout stars hanging from the ceiling.  Doug ordered the Cap’n Crunch Encrusted French Toast.  Seriously.  I said, “What are you, twelve years old?”  The serving staff were all non-traditional hippie types.  Our server had on a tee shirt that said, “I Hate People,” and another server had on a shirt that said, “Bite Me.”  They all seemed nice, so I guess the shirts were an attempt at keeping it light.  When we left, our server told us to have “the best day of your lives.”  

As we drove through Salt Lake City today, Doug kept asking me random questions that could only be answered by Mr. Google. “How much saltier is the Great Salt Lake than the ocean?” Well, according to the Utah State Parks site, the Great Salt Lake is 2 to 9 times more salty than the ocean. “Why is it salty?” A short search on Google got me this: The lake’s three major tributaries, the Jordan, Weber, and Bear Rivers together deposit about 1.1 million tons of minerals in the lake per year and it has no terminal outlet except for evaporation. So, these minerals accumulate and give the water a high salt content. I guess this is marginally more interesting than playing the “spot all of the license plates from different states” game. Of course, I didn’t take this picture of the Great Salt Lake, but I thought it was pretty:

On a side note, in my blog from June and July when we were out west the first time, I mentioned a raft trip down the Snake River in the Tetons that we took with our little girls circa 1980. When I arrived home, I found the picture. What a sweet memory.

And, one more picture from Idaho yesterday morning.