9.5.2012 – 9.5.2012  24 °C

Left Cedar Ck early this morning with a plan to drive up thru the mountains to see Cedar Breaks Nat Monument before a heavy day of driving northward towards Salt Lake. This was a great plan until I checked whether the roads were open (due to snow) and found out that the road had been closed due to a landslide! Change of plans so we drove up to Parowan and back down to Cedar Breaks NM. The drive was really pleasant, lots of trees, bits of snow as D described it ‘very pretty’. We had the debate about prettiness… is there anywhere in Au that you would describe as ‘pretty’? Beautiful, yes but pretty?

Anyway, Cedar Breaks is a small version of Bryce Canyon but it has snow covering the hoodoos! I can imagine its what Bryce must look like in the winter. Because it was so similar to Bryce, after a couple of shots we continued our journey northward.

Hunting for a morning tea spot this morning was more challenging than usual. We spent a good hour driving thru the Dixie State Forest looking for a spot to have a bite to eat. Inside the forest we found plenty of holiday homes but no public picnic tables! Eventually we had to resort to using a crappy RV park’s picnic table!! Its probably debatable, but we decided that this is maybe fractionally better than having our smoko inside the car!!

Today is really a driving day with no real plans along the way except that we thought we’d try to stay off the interstates as much as possible. So therefore, I had plotted our drive on the back roads towards SLC. Lunch saw us a third of the way we had planned to go today (that just shows how much of a detour we took this morning looking for smoko and a way to CBNM) and so at around 1pm D found this small town of Antimony near Otter State Park. We stopped in and picked up a loaf of bread and a cold drink and decided to drive back down to the State Park for our lunch. The park is on the banks of this large reservoir with really nice picnic tables and something semi interesting to look at. On arrival we noticed a lot of bugs near the ranger station and thought I’m sure further over there won’t be any.. We stopped at a likely spot and hopped out, within 5 mins we had been driven back into the car. The mosquitos at this park are enormous.. forget the monsters we found in Norway these babies are the size of locusts.. (At first we thought they were locusts) The droning noise that the swarm was making was palpable.. Oh My! Needless to say we were not going to have our lunch at this place… Unbelievably there were people camped in their RVs at this park!! Gotta be desperate to save a buck to stay in this place.

Lunch was a very disappointing affair.. Our picnic spot was back in the one-horse town at the basketball courts come fire station.. Mmm (a cut below our smoko spot and definitely worse than our morning tea spot).. The wind came up, knocked over M’s drink spilling lemonade all over our meat.. the bread was stale… All in all a lunch to forget!

After our meagre lunch we discovered we had been driving in the wrong direction (mainly because I was snoozing before lunch and was not navigating!).. Once we got back going we just decided to put down the foot and drive thru til dinner time. We spent the evening in a two horse town called Nephi (named after one of the chapter’s in the Book of Mormon) at a Mormon run motel.. We are basing this thought on the fact that the girl who served us is a kid in the owner’s family.. she is one sibling of ten!!! We decided to stay at this motel based on the fact that it was cheap and had a bbq. The price reflected the décor of the accom and the bbq was disappointingly slow at cooking our snags and onions.. Still a sausage sizzle with salad is far superior to the majority of diner options here in the US.

All in all, today was a comedy of errors and probably the first day where we have chalked up a bit of a waste!!

Song of the Day– Sister Sledge, We are Family