Traveling the USA Part II

We drive to Great Basin National Park, Nevada. The scenery along the drive is basically ‘blah’.

When we arrive at the park, we look at the exhibits and watch the movie at the visitor center.

The volunteer on duty suggests that we camp at Baker Campground, which she said is preferred by big rigs.

On the way up the mountain to the campground, it starts to snow. I guess that’s better than the rain we’ve had at times today.

We stop at the entrance to the campground to look at the map. I get out to look at the map and look over and realize that there are 8 buck with furry antlers about 15 feet away, all huddled together and staring at me. Of course the camera is in the truck. I go back to the truck and take a picture of some of them as they run away.

The campground is not really designed for large trailers like ours, and we accidentally scrape against the limb of a tree while we’re looking for a campsite. It breaks the covering to our one vent and causes a little tear on the side of our rubber roof…very frustrating. We set up camp, access the damage to the trailer, cook a nice hot dinner of comfort food, and then head out to explore the park.

As we drive up the Scenic Drive it starts snowing harder, but never really lays on the road.

The snow at the end of the Scenic Drive is several inches deep, so we take a walk about to enjoy the fresh snow and of course Joe & Jere have a snowfight.

We had hoped to take a trail to see a grove of some of the oldest trees on the planet, but all the trails (except one) are closed in the park. Too much snow on the ground. Here’s the trailhead for the grove of old trees.

We drive back to the campground and decide to stay only one night since it’s too cold to do any hiking tomorrow. Our campground is empty, so we hunker down in our warm trailer and keep the generator running til 10pm since no one’s around to complain about the noise.

We wake up to rain, lots of rain, and it keeps on raining. We need to put our bikes up on the truck, plus clean the seedpods from the top of our slides, dump/disconnect our hoses, etc. None of this will be fun in the rain so we decide to just stay another day. We'll stay in the dry trailer and get some work done. The weather is crazy! Yesterday they had a record high temperature of 93 degrees here; today they are forecasting a record-setting 'low high temperature' of 53 degrees. One day it's 20 degrees hotter than normal, the next day it's 20 degrees colder than normal. Crazy.

I spend most of the day putting together Joe's final portfolio for his home-school supervisor. I finish it by dinner (Yea!). I spend the evening uploading my blog and watching American Idol.

We're off to Great Basin National Park tomorrow.

We spend our morning touring the Kennecott Copper Mine in Bingham Canyon near Salt Lake City. It is not only the largest open pit mine in the world, it is also the largest man-made hole in the world and visible from outer space. It is actually a really interesting stop. They have a visitor center with a small museum and a movie to explain copper mining. But the neatest thing is to see these incredibly HUGE dump trucks hauling dirt around (from power shovels the size of a small office building). All of this to get some copper out of the ground.

We leave the mine, stop for lunch and then continue onto Antelope Island State Park. It's an island in the Great Salt Lake. Jere and Joe want to stick their feet in the Great Salt Lake and this is the place we were told to go to do that. We stop at the visitor center and then head down a trail to the edge of the water (the level of the water is low so it's a long walk to the water). We learn why people say the Great Salt Lake is a lake made for beauty, not recreation. It smells, and it's not a good smell, plus it is really buggy. Jere and Joe do manage to get their feet into the lake.

We take a drive to the other end of the island to see the historic ranch with it's huge buffalo herd. The buffalo are too far from the road to see very well, but we stop at the ranch and walk around.

Beside the road there is a very strange contraption. It has all kinds of fabric hanging on it, at least eight bicycle wheels, 4 solar panels and what appears to be a freezer in the center. We ask the ranger what it is and she said she is wondering the same thing. They're shooting a Harley Davidson commercial at the ranch so maybe it's related to that.

We drive back to the campground with hopes of a late swim, but the pool is drained and closed for repairs. Oh well. We spend the evening watching television.

Another hot day in Salt Lake City. We drive downtown to Mormon Temple Square. I don't agree with several beliefs of the Mormon faith, but it is an interesting religion with interesting history, so we spend several hours touring the Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) campus. They give us a tour of their facilities, including their unique convention center with a roof that has large trees growing on the top.

Interesting day; despite my disagreement with some of their beliefs. They are a fast growing religious group; one can't help but be curious about their history and current organization.

Large statue of Jesus is one of the first places they take us to on their tour.

Beautiful temple (which we are not allowed to enter; only Mormons in good standing with the church are allowed to enter):

Beautiful grounds:

Hot day, so we return to the campground and enjoy the swimming pool.

Beautiful sunny morning to pack up for our drive to Salt Lake City. We wake up early and get an early start, which is good since we plan to drive 300 miles today.

The scenery to the interstate is nice, but once we're on the interstate not much to see.

We stop for gas and Jere goes to check the tires and the gas station attendant says our one tire is in bad shape. Jere looks at it and decides the tire is fine...the guy just wants to sell us a tire (there's a tire shop at the gas station). So no problem. We get back on the interstate. About 100 miles down the road we stop at a rest stop to grab some lunch and a guy on a golf cart stops Jere and says our one tire is coming apart at the treads (same tire the other guy mentioned). He says that if we bring the trailer over to the garage they will switch out our bad tire with spare tire for free. Well, nothing is ever free so we're a little hesitant but say okay and drive the trailer over to the garage. This is when things go downhill...

The tire garage worker says that 3 out of 4 tires are coming apart at the treads. He shows us and they are indeed coming apart at the tread. He explains how heavy 5th wheel trailers need stronger tires than are normally put on the units by the manufacturers. Now our tires aren't that old (2 we put on on during our trip home from Alaska last year and then two new tires before we started this trip) so we are looking at each other trying to figure out if this is a scam or if this guy is being truthful with us. Everything he says makes sense and something is definately wrong since there is a large crack between the treads of 3 of our tires. He says they often see problems with trailers out here in the heat.

Bottom line: we buy 4 new heavy duty tires. $1000 that is not in the budget. Ugghhh. These Utah rest stops have quite a racket going on by looking at trailer tires, but we do not want a blow-out so hopefully the guy is being truthful and at least we avoided a blow out on the road.

We drive to Salt Lake City with 4 brand new tires, do some research online to see if we bought the right tires, set up camp, and go swimming to release some tension.