Salt Lake City

We were fortunate to have booked a residence hotel up the mountainside and in the suburbs.  While we were in Salt Lake the temperatures soared over 100 degrees, the dense smoke from California and Oregon wildfires rolled in like an ugly brown fog and settled itself into the valley bowl that Salt Lake sits in.  Because we were up the mountainside a bit, we were spared the worst of it.  However it also meant that we could not get out of the car while anywhere near the city  We did a lot of drive-by tourism - look there is Temple Square, look there is the Aviary, look there is the Botanical Gardens, but we did not get out of the car to explore.  

We did find a stupendous park and hiking trails up on a mesa overlooking downtown, a lovely old residential neighborhoods, the capital grounds, and a great tourist information site where I scored a FREE notebook, plus we drove by the museums, the botanical garden, the Aviary, Temple Square, The capital, the university.  

We can’t really say we explored Salt Lake City, we only saw it as we drove by, so we have pretty much bupkis to say, except we didn’t enjoy ourselves and we were glad to leave behind the brown miasma of wildfire smoke.

Anecdotal Stories and Observations 

My reputation as an aggressive driver precedes me, especially with my family. But in Salt Lake City and most of Utah, I found myself surrounded by many many large pick-up trucks driven by (mostly) men with absolutely no interest whatsoever in adhering to the 80MPH speed limit. Weaving in and out of traffic with what appeared to be utter abandon, I found them highly intimidating, even in the SUV, and stayed firmly planted in the so-called “slow lane”. I did not love it.

Masks were not in evidence in Salt Lake City nor, in fact, anywhere we went in Utah. We were, as ever, the anomoly.