I made it into Salt Lake City yesterday, after a tour of the fabulous flatness that is most of Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, and the ear-popping joy of driving over multiple mountain ranges in Wyoming and Utah.
It’s an entertaining little drive (ok, not so little…more like 1400 miles…), a vast amount of nothingness interrupted by cities with odd little names (What Cheer, Iowa; Friend, Nebraska; Egbert, Wyoming).
When I told people I was making this drive, they looked at me like I was absolutely mental. “You do know about this wonderful new contraption called the airplane, don’t you?” seemed to be the general gist of the responses.
But I really love driving. If I have time to do it, I’d much rather drive somewhere than fly. Maybe it’s the idea that travelling seems so much more concrete when you actually have to go through and see everything that normally you just see as a speck in the vast set of blocks of farmland.
Or it could have something to do with the fact that I’m a masochist, but you never know.
I’ll post further about this later on, but I did want to let anyone who particularly cared know that I did not slide into a snowbank (yet: the drive from here to Sun Valley is predicted to be snowy), and that I’m here in Utah, doing what I normally do when I’m in Utah.
Which, like most non-Mormons who are not here to ski, is wondering how the fuck I ended up in Utah in the first place.