Tag: Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City to Lake Havasu

We got to Salt Lake City on Saturday, 3 June. Easy drive, so we got in before 2:00. We stayed at the KOA on North Temple as we usually do. We thought about Antelope Island, but the biting gnats were out, and those things love to take bites out of me! We connected with a good friend on Saturday, and I made my first pizza crust in the bread maker. It came out pretty well, but I don’t know how to stretch the dough well enough! It was a bit smaller and thicker than I like. Wish I had taken a picture, because it tasted great. The recipe for my 1 pound bread maker makes 2 crusts, so I froze on for later use.

Sunday we went to a fabulous concert held at my old church, First Presbyterian in SLC. They did the Rutter Requiem, and it was fabulous. It is one of my favorite choral pieces. If I had brought concert black attire I would have sung with them, but my black polo with worn blue jeans just didn’t fit the vibe LOL! Even better than the choral music was the first piece, an incredible organ piece performed by Larry Blackburn, my favorite organist. The church is a big city church with a gothic style, and it takes a big pipe organ to fill the space. Luckily they have one, and Larry makes good use of it. I don’t know if this link to the amateur recording will work, but here it is. You might need to copy it and place it in your browser.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NeT4rr9IgR15XZv_B_asjfbsmQ0MLysY/view?usp=sharing

Monday we had dinner with more old friends, and we repeated the joy with different friends on Tuesday. So nice to see so many of the people I enjoyed in Utah. I am not sad we moved, but I do miss the people. We also took the mandatory trip to Trader Joe’s and stocked up on freezer meals and treats. We also had the meeting with our financial advisor that was the official purpose for the trip.

We left on Wednesday, 7 June, and spent the night at the Eureka Casino parking lot in Mesquite, NV, just over the border from Utah. We have stayed there before in January heading to the southwest, and it always had 7-10 rigs of various types parked overnight. This time there was just 3 of us. It was pretty hot when we arrived, so we ran the generator for AC until about 9:00 pm when it cooled off enough to  open the windows and turn on the fans. Kevin hates heat, but even he was comfortable with the temps that night.

We decided to take the slower route from Mesquite to Lake Havasu by driving NV 169, the Northshore Road that is mostly in Lake Mead National Recreation Area. Lovely drive. Here are a few pictures.

See the Colorado River down below?
Lots of little islands in the lake at this low water level
The bathtub line is >100’ above current lake levels
Red Rocks area along the road
Because I do love red rocks!

We arrived in Lake Havasu City to a reserved site at DJ’s Campground on the north side of town. It is a well-kept, older, very quiet place, but handy and priced well. It is HOT here, so boondocking wasn’t an option; we both wanted AC. We picked up the RZR from the Needles storage lot where it had been living since we left the SW, and Kevin is off today with a friend in town doing updates and modifications to it and the truck for transporting it without the trailer. The friend has an air conditioned garage, and all the tools known to mankind. I am sure they will have a blast.

I intend on starting a donation quite out of scraps cuts with my tumbler die. It is nice, mindless seeing, but the result is cute and for a good cause. However I never seem to get the scrap pile lowered!

Finally made it to Death Valley

We left North Platte on Friday,29 October. We stayed at the KOA in Rawlins, a nice spot, then got to the Salt Lake City KOA late morning on Saturday. We were able to meet up with friends, ate well, but only had the two little kids camped next to us a Trick or Treaters. I gave an entire bag of candy to one of my friends to take into work! We stayed until Tuesday morning, the headed on our way. We spent the night at the Eureka Casino in Mesquite, NV. Very quiet, but we sure had to pull out the leveling blocks!

After we left Mesquite, we started getting check engine lights on the motorhome. The error was low manifold pressure, so we called to Freightliner in Las Vegas to check it out. Turns out a hose had developed a crack and needed replaced. Since it was a formed hose, it had to be ordered from the warehouse in Phoenix. They let us stay overnight next to their lot, and then replaced the hose the next morning. $45 hose, $40 shipping, and the rest of the $600+ bill was labor. Sigh. This is the first non-routine issue we have had in 3 1/2 years and almost 40,000 miles, so I won’t complain too much. Still, it was too bad this didn’t happen at home with $95/hour labor rates instead of the $175/hour in Vegas.

We finally got set up at Death Valley, and we lucked into our favorite site! It is on the east side of the lot with nothing between us and the mountains except a small road. My camera was dead, so I hope you can stand these iPhone photos.

Timbisha Shoshone settlement and headquarters on the left and part of the staff housing for Furnace Creek on the right.
Rather flat light, but the color contrast is still interesting
The mountains at sunset looking a bit south
Mountains at sunset looking a bit north

I can look at those mountains all day! We haven’t had a lot of chance though because Kevin discovered the base plate on the Jeep was loose. This is what attached to the tow bars to tow the Jeep, so loose is a danger! The closest place was Vegas again, this time Indoor RV Center. They came recommended, and so far is seems valid. They saw us on Friday to evaluate and quote the repairs, then on Monday Kevin drove back to get the repair completed. It would have been completed then, but we have discovered the idiots who originally installed it didn’t follow the directions or use the right parts! I am livid. We had to have a complete new baseplate installed plus extra labor to drill out or cut off a bunch of bolts put in wrong. It was so much work that we had to come back today too! Since northern Vegas is a bit over 2 hours from Death Valley, that is an awful lot of driving. We don’t know the final bill, but it will be north of $1500. The shop rate here is even worse than the Freightliner dealer – $189. They do seem to know what they are doing though, and a base plate is a critical piece of safety equipment. We just can’t stand to have an issue with it, and better here than Canada or Alaska next summer!

We have yet to attend a single 49ers activity, but we will start this evening if we get back in time. And we have the funds to pay the bills since we knew this day would come. Hopefully my next post will be much more positive.

Salt Lake City #2 and St.George

It was quite cool and wet on Monday, so we didn’t do an awful lot. We did get some shopping done, and we had a good meeting with our financial planner. We have a short term financial contract that expires next summer, and I will be going on social security next year at age 66. So we really needed to chat face to face about some options. Now that we have talked through it, we can do the rest over email and the phone when the time comes. We ate dinner at a lovely Mediterranean place called Mazzo’s. I recommend it.

Tuesday was a very enjoyable day though. The weather cleared, and the mountains were beautiful. There was no way I could get a good picture, so you will have to take my word for it! We also did a major shopping trip to Trader Joe’s for the last time this year.  A follow-on trip to Smith’s grocery stores for a pork butt followed. We were having friends over, and I wanted to make pulled pork. A good rub, a bit of chicken brother, and 60 minutes in the instant pot (plus 20 minutes pressure release) made a gorgeous base for pulled pork.

Part way through the “pulling” part

I decided on a baked potato bar with pork, cheese, broccoli, butter, sour cream, and green onions. I did debate how to cook 10 potatoes in the motorhome. Should I use the “automatic” function? Combo micro/convection but manual? Or do I do it the old fashioned way and just oil them, sprinkle with kosher salt, and bake them at 400 for an hour? I ended up old fashioned because I wanted a nice crisp skin on the potatoes, and it worked. Of course we also had the complication of the campground power going out! I had to run the generator for about 3 hours since I was using the Instant Pot, the convection oven, and the washer and dryer. Luckily no one was around to bother with the noise, though the in-coach generator isn’t terribly loud. Any generator is annoying to me though, but the bigger heating appliances don’t work on battery power.

We did have a great time with a bunch of my choir buddies. They even did the dishes! We were able to finish off the flan too.

This morning we were out of the campground a little after 9:00 am for the drive through town and on to St.George, UT. I timed it so I didn’t have to drive in heavy traffic, but oh my, was the road bad for about 5-7 miles in northern Utah county! It was a construction zone, and the road was uneven and had little wiggles, not curves, just wiggles that were hard to see the marking for. Once we got through that it was smooth sailing.

As we got near Kolob Canyon, the landscape started showing its renowned red rock beauty. The land is so big that I just can’t get a picture of it, but you have probably seen them other places. I started feeling I could breath again in the dry, clear air with space all around.

We are saying at our normal St.George spot, Temple View RV Park. We got a huge pull-through site, and the temperature of 80 degrees at 4:00 pm convinced me I could start wearing sandals again. We sat outside for quite a while, then went to dinner. As we left the restaurant, the hills were just finishing some reflected beauty. Again, my camera can’t capture the breath of the view, but I at least tried.

The view was somewhat spoiled by businesses
But I cut the businesses out of this one.

Tomorrow we head towards Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. It has a no-reservation campground, so we are going to get there early. Hope we find a spot!

Salt Lake City #1

It isn’t that I think SLC is the best city in the nation/world, but that I expect to  have two posts while we are here.

We did have an easy ride through SLC on I-15 because we timed it that way. I have found pretty much any city is the easiest to drive through between 10 and 2, so we cruised through between 12 and 1, arriving at the KOA around 1:30. This is a nice KOA with lots of trees and even some grass. The sites are big for a RV park, with maybe 10’ between rigs. We got settled in and generally just relaxed. The. Verizon signal is ok here, so I downloaded a number of television episodes in preparation for no signal in Death Valley.

Saturday we took a drive to one of our favorite places, Antelope Island State Park. Weather was definitely coming in, and sadly there was quite a bit of haze. I still took a couple of pictures of the mountains across the lake.

The lake surprisingly wasn’t too low, or at least not for late fall. When I first moved to the area in 2012, we could canoe all around the island. Now you can only paddle around the western side because Farmington Bat on the east is only a couple of inches deep near the island. Sad. All the people on the Wasatch Front are using up the mountain water before it reaches the Great Salt Lake.
We also did some shopping. A particularly interesting purchase was a dozen 4 oz. canning jars to make flan sous vide, as described by the server at the Basque restaurant a few days ago. I use my immersion blender to mix these up, and it works great. Here is Kevin’s sous vide setup using a small ice chest.

A cover makes it much easier to cook.

And inside were 8 jars of flan plus one jar of left over custard.

Sorry for the poor quality. My high res version got deleted!

The results (samples this morning) were fantastic! Smooth and silky, though not easy to get out of the jars.

This morning we went to our old church, First Presbyterian, and I sang in the choir. It was great fun hanging out with my old friends and singing again. A small group of us went to lunch at a great Greek place called “The Other Place.” It has been around for years, but we never went before for some reason. That was definitely our mistake! It has been family run for about 40 years, and the food was food was great. We both had breakfast, but some of our friends have the lunches, and they were huge. I want to come back because they also have liver and onions, a weakness of mine.