Monday, December 21, 2009

Day 2 – Sunday

Got up early and headed out of Twin Falls. In the daylight, we could see the Snake River, very impressive and a deep gorge itself. Just outside of Twin Falls (literally just a mile or so from our hotel) we stopped for gas at a truck stop and I took some pictures to prove that we were once again in the middle of nowhere. We laughed at a large hotel that was across from the truck stop, standing all alone. With Twin Falls just a mile or so away, I'm wondering how that hotel will stay open. Maybe someday that area will be booming and they can say they got in on the ground floor, so to speak...

The rest of Idaho was a bunch of farms, and they were pretty in the morning because it was very cold and they were covered in a thick frost. I took some pictures out the window.

As it got a little warmer, the flat and brown thing came back and was very boring. Idaho quickly turned into Utah, and after a couple hours, the landscape changed to something a little prettier than flat and brown. I took a picture of DH airing up the tires at another truck stop, with a pretty Utah mountain in the background. We took lots of pictures of Utah rock formations as we passed by Salt Lake. We passed into Wyoming and at the state line, there was a small town, though we would have called it large at that point, compared to everything we'd seen in the last 24 hours, and lots and lots of fireworks stores. I guess fireworks must not be legal in Utah, but obviously are in Wyoming. DH wishes we'd bought some; I'm glad we didn't.

As we left the little town, I eventually came to realize that Wyoming is the most deserted place I have ever seen. There were no other towns, no farms, no animals. It was just flat and brown as far as the eye could see.
I felt like we could see half the state at any given time, and we saw nothing, nothing, nothing at all. There was a stretch of highway where I did see 3 dead wild pigs on the side of the road, and that was my only amusement. Wyoming's resource is natural gas and electricity, I guess, so every now and then we'd see an area of travel trailers where I guess the pipeline inspectors live. I expected to see cowboys riding horses, or cattle ranches, or anything at all. I found the whole thing very bizarre. Eventually we got to an actual city called Rawlins, and we pulled in and ate dinner there. I wonder what everyone in Rawlins does, or how they got there, since Rawlins itself is surrounded by NOTHING for miles in every direction. I had been posting our locations on Facebook every time we ate or slept, and so I quickly learned that one of our wedding guests had previously lived in Rawlins. I planned to ask him all of my questions about Rawlins and Wyoming, but unfortunately he ended up unable to attend our wedding at the last minute, so I still don't know.

Wyoming became Colorado. We had intended to sleep in Kansas that night, but since we were still a little behind schedule and the continual changes in time zone were working against us, we again decided that we weren't going to make it to our reservation. Now I know better than to plan for 12 hours of driving per day, especially across time zones. We wanted to use hotels.com as much as possible because we get rewards points for free nights, so we tried to book a room using that site. I was using my iPhone and at the last screen, I got an error message, so I didn't think our new reservation in Colorado went through. DH called them and they verified we had a reservation for that night, but didn't realize they were simply confirming my original reservation for Kansas. After much confusion and another call to hotels.com late at night, we ended up not using hotels.com at all and just walking into a Sleep Inn in Denver. I used the bathroom in the lobby and it was dis-gus-ting. Our room was not quite so gross, but after I brushed my teeth I found that the sink was clogged. We had already brought all our luggage up to the room and were too tired to complain and change rooms. We had a ton of luggage with us and since our truck does not have tinted windows or a lockbox in the back, we had to bring everything in with us every night. Much of it was not valuable, but was wedding related and simply could not be replaced so close to the wedding, so it all had to come in. I wish we had booked the room through hotels.com just so I could leave that hotel a bad review.

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