100926 – Big Trip

Sunday (Sep 26)

I lingered to  watch the niners game before I took off.  Hah!  What a waste of time that was.  I watched them suck badly, finished packing, and finally hit the road for real about 2pm.  I hadn’t eaten so I stopped at Big Ed’s on Fourth for quite a nice chicken-fried steak, and was really on the road and heading down I-80 by 3pm.

I made Elko just about at dark, filled up the tank and did what was to become a recurring chore – stretching to the far reaches of my large windshield to wash off the splattered bugs. My big tall van with the nearly vertical windshield is quite the bug collector, I was soon to find.
I had a couple of FAILS on finding a place to sleep, but then the nice casino lady sent me to Walmart, which turned out to be quite enjoyable.  It’s on top of a hill, as so many of them are.  I parked on the edge of the parking lot and had a million-dollar view of the whole valley!  I texted my Elko friends for breakfast suggestions; each and every one replied with a different idea.

Monday

The breakfast winner is the Coffee Mug, mostly because it has parking and was on the way out of town. I took the cutoff at Wells to go over the top of the Great Salt Lake.  I’d done it two years ago and remembered it as quite pretty.  I had forgotten that it is also quite long and boring.  The other time it was at the very end of the trip, and now it is the very beginning, so which I take to mean that it takes a while to get used to the basic boredom of driving.

Logan – Logan seems like an awesome little town.  It’s right on the edge of some big mountains.  Approaching from the west, you arrive in the prosperous Mormon farming valley, continuing through the marshes straight for the mountains. Logan is tucked right up against those mountains which you eventually realize means that unlikely looking small crease in the solid wall of rock must be where your road eastward must go!

The iPad tells me that the Ibis Cafe has wifi, and tells me where it is (my first actual use of the GPS!).  It was very pleasant.  The one and only other time I rolled through Logan, I found the bookstore very pleasant, so I guess that means I like it here. I LOVE the rows and rows of tidy brick houses, although the underlying Mormonism creeps me out…  On second thought, I probably wouldn’t like it here for very long….

Up the hill past Utah State.  There is a ranger station at top of the valley, with a commanding view of what turns out to be Cache Valley, a famous place in fur trapper lore.  The fur trapper period of Western history (roughly from Lewis and Clark to the discover of gold in Cali) is very interesting to me.  The white folks still mostly got along with the native folks, and the land was still wide open and un-abused(*).  Less likeable is that already the white folks were exploiting their resource of choice (in this case beavers) to exhaustion.

(*) Some future trip will be to follow Lewis and Clark, whom I like for the same reasons.  Lore of the various Oregon Trail, Santa Fe Trail and all the other settler trails make me sad and depressed for the same reasons.

I head up the canyon to Preston Valley CG.  It’s small, 11 units, right on the Logan River.  There is no one else here.  I select site #3, and have a grand ole time following the trails along the river and puttering about by the creek.