Day 13, Rock Springs to Pkcatello

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Day 13 May 27 Rock Springs Wy - Pocatello, Id

Yesterday evening, before going to bed I decided to check the weather in Yellowstone. I'm glad I did. They were predicting 6 inches of snow and major traffic problems with their holiday visitors. Now, we are not into stress and believe in keeping things as simple as possible, so we cancelled our reservations at Old Faithful and decided to stay out of the mountains as much as possible.

We set the GPS lady for Pocatello, ID, and away we went, traveling on Interstate 80 and, later, on I15 north to Pocatello. We wern't too disappointed to miss Yellowstone as we've been there before - years ago when we drove to Wyoming to visit my sister, Louise, when her family lived in Cheyanne.

It started raining, then turning to hard showers as we crossed the border to Utah and headed towards Ogden. I80 roughly follows the old Oregon Trail. Thousands of pioneers followed this trail, many Mormans settled near Salt Lake City and many others went on to California and Oregon. Looking out on the land I try to imagine the pioneers, their wagons and cattle plodding along on the relatively level land. I've read some books that tell about their trek. They must have been very strong and determined people, and, very corageous, not know exactly where they were going, nor when they would find their next meal. In a good day they could travel up to 15 miles and some days they only moved one or two miles. It must have been a teriffically difficult trip.

As we turn north on I15, the temperature drops to 45 degrees and the rain is really coming down. Will it snow? Probably not unless the temp drops more. The surrounding mountains are covered with snow. I'm just not used to this kind of weather in late May. I guess we were fortunate to have such good weather up to this day.

No pictures today. Nothing but rain, low clouds, and mist on the highway. Not an exciting ride. We did have one interesting event. I noticed that the on-coming traffic lanes were empty, the about a mile ahead we could see flashing red police lights. I slowed down to see three cop cars stopped on the empty road, one cop sticking his rifle out the window at a stopped car and several others crouched behind their cars. One bad guy was on the ground, handcuffed. "Enough of this," I thought, "I'll watch the ending on the tv program, Cops.

Pocatello is a large city, population over 55,000, and a college town. It's surrounded by snow covered mountains and that's all I can say about this place. Looks good to me.

M and I talked today about our trip; what we would change if we did it over. We would try to stay one day at Zion, one day at Bryce and drive from Bryce through Capitol Reef and Natural Bridges to Blanding. From there we would drive through Monument Valley and Cortez. We would miss the exhilerating drive with the gravel road and switch-backs. We stopped at Mexican Hat and that's no place to stay overnight.

In fact, it was in Mexican Hat that M and I ordered our Navaho Tacos. The tacos were made with Navaho fry bread, a kind of pita that's fried in a pan. Then, refried beans, diced tomatoes, some wierd tasting salsa stuff and cheese that wasn't melted very much. It was a gloppy mess to say the least and not tasty at all. After a few bites, We decided to skip the taco and have some ice cream instead. So much for going ethnic.

Bye for now.

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