A nice drive & dinner with friends

Saturday, 16 July.  After poor nights sleep I woke to a cool, clear morning.  Further problem was that because it is summer the motel turns off the heat and only has air-conditioning.  This wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that Ely is in the high desert.  Yes it was in the 80s yesterday, but it was in late upper 40s during the night.  This also meant that when I got back from breakfast and wanted to work on the computer, I had to sit in a rather chilly room.  Such are the hardships of traveler must face.  🙂

Today is sort of an easy day with an easy drive, I hope, to the Salt Lake City area.  If all goes well I’ll be joined by one or more folk I know online for dinner.  That would be nice.

The drive up to Salt Lake City was quite easy.  There was no traffic really to speak of.  The drive up 93 was very lonely.  There was some traffic but not very much.  I drove through at first farmland and then semi desert scrub.  I was driving down the center of a wide valley with hills and mountains to either side.  Some of the mountains still had snow and protected spots.  Off in the distance I could see on occasions taller mountains that were very much snow-covered.  I would expect the amount of snow to increase as I drove further north.  It is a very pretty, desolate landscape.

As I turned onto alternate 93, traffic dropped almost nothing.  Now the hills and mountains were much closer as I drove north.  As I approached window for the white salt desert appeared through the mountains.  By the time I got to win over it seemed to stretch forever.  The drive across the Great Salt Desert was quick.  At varying distances to the north of the highway ran the railroad tracks that the California Zephyr trundled down.  As I approached Salt Lake City, I could see that one of the hillsides was aflame and smoke rose into the cloudless sky.

I settled in to the Motel 6 and contacted a few people to coordinate the dinner. Anna Vandenhazel, her husband, and her son would be joining me for dinner along with David-Glenn Anderson who lives a little north in Ogden.  Ray Buck wasn’t able to join us.  However, he and I had a very long in good conversation.  As I was tired the idea of going next door to Denny’s appealed.

As is often the case, and not with Motel 6 alone, the WiFi they purported to have worked slower than dial-up.  Calling customer support did not help.  So I watched television and got to bed fairly early.