Antelope Island... SLC... Mystic Hot Springs...
Up at dawn, I enjoyed a scenic drive: we were going along a thin spit of land that headed out into the Great Salt Lake illuminated by the rising sun. Soon we were at Antelope Island, a place where we could fiddle with our luggage, make a camp breakfast, swim in the Great Salt Lake, and shower.
One of the things I'd do when fiddling with luggage was transfer photos from my camera to my laptop. But this morning, my laptop acted up. It saw its hard disk, then didn't see it. Uh-oh. I tried a few things... I realized I was losing time. So I shoved my laptop into my little backpack to deal with later. And instead of swimming in the salt lake, I just had time splash a little. But that was enough. It was good to smell salt water again.
Our next stop was downtown Salt Lake City. Instead of seeing the sights, I decided to resuscitate my laptop. I wanted to rescue the photos that were already on it; and I wanted to make more room for photos on my ancient camera, whose puny memory only had memory for ~64 photos.
So while the main group headed to the Mormon Temple, I went to Vasuvio's Cafe, which had yummy hippy-dippy food and power outlets. I ate and totally failed to repair my laptop. I'd have to make it through the rest of the trip keeping only as many photos as would fit on my camera. Maybe my earlier photos were lost. (Since you've seen my earlier photos, you won't be surprised to learn that I fixed the laptop once I got home.)
After I gave up on the laptop, I had just a short while to wander downtown SLC. I walked past some old apartment buildings and visited the library. I walked past city hall, noticing a strange plaque in the ground that said "Engineers Department Salt Lake City — Standard of Measure". I looked at the line on that plaque, trying to figure out if it was about an inch (no), a centimeter (no), or something like that. I never figured it out.
We hit some traffic heading out of SLC. While Charlie took a break to consult maps and find a faster route, we stopped in a Wal-Mart parking lot. This gave excited foreigners a chance to visit a genuine Wal-Mart. God Bless America. I had a chance to talk with some folks. Leena talked about an orangutang sanctuary, which was pretty much exactly the kind of conversation you want to have on a bus full of backpackers. I reflected on our rough sleep-on-the-bus the previous night and our visit to SLC: we'd missed an opportunity. Instead of learning about the Mormon temples, we should have asked polygamists for tips on how a dozen people could share a bed with jostling each other so much. Our bus' polygamy experts (folks who'd watched the "Big Love" TV series) told me that the polygamists don't actually share beds after all. So we hadn't missed anything.
Our next camping spot was a hippy hot springs resort, Mystic Hot Springs. Mike Ginsburg, who'd done some artsy stuff for the Grateful Dead, had bought this resort, a place for people to soak in overheated water and make art. Despite my feelings about overheated water, even I could tell that this spot was pretty cool. There were horses, donkeys, llamas, and such to look at. There were decorated Deadhead buses. I didn't keep any photos from here, but fortunately, some of my fellow travelers did.
On this night, I set up my tent. This was my first time setting up a tent. I had help from Fabrice—he'd set up a similar tent before. But mostly what he did was say "Yeah, there's supposed to be another tent peg," thus reassuring me that I hadn't screwed something up.
I was pretty pleased that the tent didn't collapse on me overnight. Some folks stayed up to enjoy the hot springs. I instead crawled into my tent and fell asleep pretty quick.
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