Before we left I had looked at attractions in SLC and found the salt lake was fairly close by. We decided to stop there along the way (it's about 45 min north of the city). The scenery was beautiful - turquoise blue lake, snow capped mountains, islands in the lake. We kept driving until we got to the main island (there's a man made connection to it from the mainland). There we got out and went to the visitor's center (to buy post cards - what else?). After looking at the island map we chose to try to see the buffalo. That's right, there are buffalo on the island. They just roam around - no pens or holding areas.
We went to Buffalo Point and started hiking up to the top of the "point". Oh yes, we were wearing flip flops. It was actually fine - I love my Rainbows! My biggest problem came about halfway up the hike, when I got a piece of sand in my eye. Ouch!! It would not come out of my eye at all . I tried washing it out with water, keeping my eye closed, blinking, anything. Eventually I just gave up and decided to keep hiking and hope it would sort itself out, which it eventually did. We got to the top of the hike and looked out - amazing! It felt like you could see the whole world from there, and that the world was just the surrounding mountains.
And then we hit the downfall of the area. There are TONS of biting gnats. I had read there were gnats online before we left, but I hadn't realized they bit. And it hurt! The gnats did't have any of the pain killers the mosquitoes have. I lucked out and didn't get bitten too much. Katie unknowingly walked through a swarm and got bitten a LOT. We were less thrilled about the views after that. But we trekked back down the trail and back to the car. Finally, I wanted to go to the lake and step in the water. We headed down to the beach and dipped our feet in. It was much warmer than we expected (although we were in a very shallow area).
After heading back to the car we headed out to our accommodations for the evening. Along the way Katie spotted a place for me to get my hair cut, so we stopped in there and then got dinner. (I've been wanting to get a hair cut for a little less than a month.) Eventually we got to the destination. So for our housing for tonight we decided to try couch surfing. The idea is there are people who have extra beds/couches in their homes which they would be happy to lend out to people traveling. And there are people traveling who need beds/couches. Couchsurfer.org tries to connect these people. I'd heard about them before and, after a bit of research, decided to give it a go for this trip. To start with, neither Katie nor I ever felt unsafe, just really really awkward. We're not the best conversationalists with normal people, and this guy was not totally normal. It was clear he had smoked a LOT of pot in his life (he told us he just returned from Burning Man), and he had gone through a divorce (which I'm thinking she initiated). He was just kind of depressed and not interesting. He had his kids over, and they were pretty cool. Nothing "bad" just a lot of awkward. And his house smelled weird - like pot smoke and incense (shocking).
Anyways, Katie and I decided pretty quickly we did not want to spend two nights (which was the original plan). So we came up with all kinds of reasons why we had to leave the next morning and not come back (turns out he isn't so great at remembering things - the next day he just said 'Well, it was nice having you stay. Bye.'). We sat through a movie with him and his children (The Fastest Indian, it was actually a pretty good movie). But yeah, just awkward all around.
Day's Map
No comments:
Post a Comment