9/26/2017 - Driving East - Day 2

Tuesday - Whew, Joe put in one hard day of driving today -- and he drove every mile of it.  Basically, he was in the saddle 12 hours, 7:00 to 7:00, or rather, 8:00 to 8:00 since we are in a different time zone.  We got an early start, crossed the Utah state line about 5 minutes later, and headed across the Utah salt flats.  We passed the turnoff to the Bonneville Speedway, and drove for miles through the flat area, dusted in white -- we assume salt, and there was a lot of standing water on parts of it.

We passed a Morton Salt plant along here too.  That seemed fitting.  If you enlarge the photo, you can see their logo on the front of the building.

 We drove along the edge of the Great Salt Lake for a few miles, with mountains on the other side of the road. 

We hit Salt Lake City about 9:50 MST (I will switch to that time zone now). This city is surrounded by mountains.  You can see their tall downtown buildings in the distance, with the pretty mountains in the background.

 We took the 215 bypass, but we still drove in this metropolitan area for over an hour.  These mountains were snow-capped, so they must have been a little higher.

We finally made a fuel stop at a Flying J truckstop at Springville (the southern end of the SLC suburbs), and Joe did his tire check.  He wanted to do this yesterday but didn't find any air at the truckstop we stopped at.

We got on I-15 and took it south to US 50, then southeast to I-70.  U.S. 50 and I-70 run together the rest of the way across eastern Utah and across Colorado.  It's a scenic drive, and it was beautiful.

We did see some wildlife after we got on the I-70 part.  We saw a herd of elk, maybe 10; then some wild mustangs, and some donkeys or burros but we don't know if they were wild, and then some antelope.  And a prairie dog at a rest stop.  We were moving along too fast for any wildlife pictures, but it was sure nice to get to see them.  And I got to see some fall colors through here.  (You can see that I didn't have time for any driving - I was busy)

We left the mountains and trees behind and got into cliffs and rocks for a while.

We made a pitstop at a rest stop and the Indians were out with their pottery and jewelry.  We looked it over, and even found rings we liked, but we didn't buy anything.

As the sun got lower and shadows began changing the colors in the cliffs, I took more pictures.

We finished Utah and crossed the Colorado state line at 5:50, and fueled again in Grand Junction. 
This is an ever-changing landscape and a wide variety of scenery.

And we made it 168 miles across Colorado.  We were driving right along the Colorado River for miles and miles, but it finally got too dark to see. Part of this section had a double decker highway -- the opposing lanes of traffic were offset just a little, and raised a level so we were practically driving beneath them.

We made to the Walmart in Avon, elevation 7,516, temperature 56 degrees at 8:00 p.m. when we stopped.  I'm pretty sure this is a ski resort town, but it was too dark to see when we arrived.  And we are not very many miles from Vail.

So we got 610 miles in today, plus yesterday's 482, so that's 1,092, almost halfway there.  We didn't even look for a laundromat tonight, so now the second laundry basket is filling up.  May have to wait until Vincennes to get that taken care of.

Off to bed we go, so we can do it all over again tomorrow.