musings

The tent was like a sauna this morning, so we all crawled out about 9am. Of course DB remained asleep for another hour while we sat on picnic benches and wrote letters etc.

DB and I went for a good swim in the camp pool, and then we all drove into town to see the sights. The weather was even hotter than yesterday and it was good to go inside the huge air-conditioned Capitol Building. A huge place with marble floors and walls and a big St Paul’s like dome in the centre, around which were scenes depicting the early days of Salt Lake City and Utah. The East-West railroad was joined in Utah which doesn’t say much for the lazy buggers working from the West.

Went and donged the replica Liberty Bell and took a look at the ‘Mormon Meteor’ an ancient racing car which set up all the Bonneville speed records. The guy who drove it had a record of 2 million miles’ driving without any accident and is the only man to drive in a race for 24 hours without leaving his seat.

Outside again it was too hot to sit on the steps, but the view from the hill was tremendous. A long, straight road glittering with cars stretched from Capitol Hill, through the city and out into the scrubland beyond. On either side of us the Rocky mountains loomed majestic.

We went back to the New Eastern Cafe where we had eaten yesterday, hoping we wouldn’t get the same waitress we had yesterday (BUNACers can’t afford to tip). I had a really good pork chow mein with a strange kind of biscuit-like noodle base. We walked around the clean, wide and fairly quiet streets stopping frequently at the ever-flowing water fountains dotted around the place.

Went to have a look at the Mormon temple. Actually there were several buildings in a peaceful garden. The actual temple was not open to the public but they had a meeting house and tabernacle which you could go around. There was a fountain memorial to the seagull, the state bird thus named because it was a flock of seagulls which got sent down to eat up the locusts munching the Mormon pioneers’ crops. Wrote my name and address in the visitors’ book and then we rushed back to the car before the meter ran out.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 21st, 1976 at 1:42 pm and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.