If you ever happen to drive from Yellowstone to the Salt Lake City area, you’ll notice a few strange things about your route.  You’ll be puttering along nicely, believing you’re making excellent southward progress, when suddenly you find yourself in Idaho, on a road with a different number.  As you’re scratching your head and consulting your map, never fear – about 45 seconds later you’re back in Wyoming again, on the same old road, as though Idaho were just a momentary hallucination.  Then, a while later, you rejoice – you’ve arrived in Utah!  No, wait, here comes Wyoming again.  It is a very hard state to escape.

The other thing that’s odd, at least to someone from the east coast, is how little is out here.  We’d planned to stop for dinner and made the foolish assumption that a town that actually appeared on the map, in a substantial size font, would have some sort of restaurant.  Then we’d arrive there and find the customary “Pop. 37” sign, four houses or so, and maybe a couple of trucks.  We had to find a town with a large, bold font on the map (probably equivalent to say, Hartford on a map of New England) to find anything that would remotely qualify as a “town” to us New Englanders.  And in between the marked towns on the map, forget it – nothing but endless fields, trees, and maybe a few cows.

Prior to all this driving excitement, however, we made another stop.  The south entrance to Yellowstone leads directly into Grand Teton National Park, and we’d planned to spend a couple of hours there.  It was a beautiful place – we did a 2.5 mile hike, had a picnic lunch (surprise, peanut butter!) along a breathtaking lake, and wished we’d had time to ride on the lovely bike path that seemed to run along much of the length of the park.  We saw the iconic mountains towering in the distance, with glaciers still clinging to their tops.  Bob and I both agreed this was a place we’d like to come back to.

As we got into Utah, the scenery changed dramatically.  Instead of lush forests and snowcapped peaks, we saw dramatic red rocks, sometimes streaked with pinks and greens.  Our destination was a cabin at an RV resort outside Salt Lake City – chosen purely for convenience and with a less than charming setting right off the highway bordering on a gas station parking lot.  But it was nice to sleep in a bed for a change, and very pleasant to be warm.

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From Bob:

Tonight in a cabin in Utah, perhaps the very same on where Jerry Garcia hung out in that song, we are enjoying the beds.  It was a bit of a struggle to figure out who would get which bed, and Lanie is sleeping on the floor on one of our thermarest pads. Well, anyway, I plan to be enjoying a bed in a few minutes.

In much the same way that our family had trouble deciding who got the top bunk and who had to share their space, I’ve been spending the last few minutes filling up the four electrical outlets in our cabin.  These are a precious resource.

                At this point, after some rather primitive surroundings at Yellowstone (remember those signs in the bathroom about personal care items only), we have a good number of electrical items that need charging.  Right now the battery charger is plugged in and charging AAs for the camera.  Also in that outlet, Jen’s Kindle is plugged in.  This device is important because it gives us Internet access, even without a hot spot. 

                The iPod is in another socket, paired with this laptop.  The laptop we will continue to charge, as we don’t expect to see another outlet until Colorado, four days from now.  Once something gets fully charged, we have two cell phones to plug in.

                We do have the car outlets, and Charles gave us a nifty gadget that lets us plug anything into those, but things charged in the car seem to get depleted very quickly.  Maybe it was the altitude, or the cold, but I think it has something to do with the physics of the car electricity.  Also, our car is working so hard, and doing so well, we like to give it a break any time we can.

                So we plug in when we can.  This is what I like to think of as resource management.  It’s much the same as all those pepper and salt packets I took from Taco Mike’s in Wyoming during one of our few fast-food stops (the first since Canadian Wendy’s, I think).   We also grab ice and water from soda fountains when we can and napkins and plastic cutlery when they’re within reach.  Not too much, just what we need.

                Good news, we heard a ranger talking the other day about what background people need to become rangers.  He said resource management was one of the things people study.  Jen and I want to be park rangers someday, and we’ve already got a head start.