Day 18

Melba, Idaho to Springville, Utah (south of Salt Lake City)

505 miles

12 hours

Weather: 80 day, 50 night

Today we left Colleen’s house after everyone had some breakfast and Dennis and I had our coffee. Eric slept late and felt much better this morning! So thankful for that!

We drove through the southern part of Idaho-much of which looked like large sand dunes covered with desert bushes. When we entered Nevada, we were in the Pacific Time Zone for a short while-so on our trip we have covered all 4 time zones! Driving south on highway 93 was quite stressful-the road was very unforgiving and extremely windy. At one point a dust devil came across the road and took our RV into the next lane. Thankfully the road was pretty empty most of the time.

In Nevada we turned east for the first time on our trip and headed for Utah-we expected to stop and camp for the night in Wendover at the Bonneville Speedway on the salt flats. However, things did not turn out exactly as we expected. The salt flats were really cool-we drove down the long road to the International Speedway and found that a group of people had the end of the road closed off for their campers and RV’s as they were running races out on the flats. We were not allowed to camp out there as expected, since they were there (which seemed really silly-there was plenty of room!) and they would not let us drive our car out onto the flats at all. That was  big bummer. But, we did get out, walk on the flats and take some pictures. We did not see them race at all-the winds were keeping them from being able to race evidently. 

So, how were the salt flats? Well, in a word, salty! The ground was dry and hard as cement in some areas-cracked and white. In other areas, the ground was damp and the salt was crusty and stuck to the bottoms of our shoes like wet mud. The sea of salt stretched on and on for miles beyond our sight. When we left the speedway and got back on the highway to drive the rest of the way across, it was an endless plain of white. Consistent with what we had heard, mirages are common on the flats-as the heat rising from the flats appears as areas of water in the distance, but turns out to be just more salty ground. Also, in the distance the salt sometimes looked like waves on the ocean-with the whitecaps curling at the crest of the waves. This ended up being areas of unevenness in land-high and low spots-but the appearance was pretty neat.

The only real downside to traveling today was the haze. Because of the winds everywhere, dust particles clouded the air so much that visibility was very poor. In fact, as we approached Salt Lake City, the mountains surrounding the city were only barely visible as a shadow through the haze.

Since our camping plans for the night were foiled, we decided to just drive as far as we could and stop somewhere along the road for the night. We drove through Salt Lake City (past the Great Salt Lake) and pulled off near the town of Springville and parked at a Best Western Hotel (with the manager’s permission) for the night.