Day Seven - Sunday

Well...

....

We are in San Francisco...sorta...actually, we're across the bridge on the Oakland side of things. This is not to say that we have not been in SF yet, in fact, we spent about an hour and a half driving around SF looking for a hotel to stay at. I have come to the conclusion that nobody visits SF because there are no hotels. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

We started out today in Salt Lake City at 10am and headed west, across Nevada. We made a brief stop at the very smelly salt lake. I was brave enough to venture over the crunchy salt flats to the water's edge but I didn't actually go really close because of the sludge bordering the water. It was gross, it was smelly, and overall I was unimpressed. Plus it was kinda hazy so we couldn't see very much anyways.

After that we hopped back onto the freeway and eventually came to the great Salt Lake Desert, which is white. We couldn't decide if the whiteness was sand or dried salt so we pulled over and I went down to investigate. Turns out it is a layer of salt over grey, squishy clay. It was weird, but kinda cool. We also saw some nifty salt collection/processing plant factory things with the Morton salt chick on the building.

At around noon Nevada welcomed us and we entered the Pacific Time Zone, which threw us off, again. :) We had an interesting experience in Elko, Nevada where we stopped for lunch. It was this tiny town and we walked into the restaurant and everybody looked at us like we had two heads. And to add to the weirdness the soup of the day was macaroni and cheese soup. We didn't order it.

Nevada was kind of interesting in a not so good way. There are a bunch of small towns, dead grass, semi-pretty mountains, and whacked out rest stops. We stopped at one that looked like a regular rest stop but just had individual toilets which turned out to be biffys which smelled so gross we almost died. Also there are slot machines and casinos everywhere you look, even in the gas stations.

At 5:45 California welcomed us and we made our way to SF. We got to Sacramento around sunset and we were treated a beautiful one. It was sooo pretty. I forgot how much I love the mountains and water. Driving through California was also really, really pretty. We were up high in the mountains and there was still snow on the ground and we went from 80 degrees to like 53.
However, once we got to SF we were tired. And we couldn't find a hotel! And people drive way too fast, like, way, way, way to fast. I thought we were going to die so many times! And they cut you off and merge w/o their blinkers and the roads are narrow...it was scary...and there were no hotels, did I mention that there were NO hotels??

Oh, and when we first got the city and were crossing the bay bridge there was this police car in front of us and all of a sudden he starts driving back and forth across the lanes, keeping all the cars behind him. Back and forth, back and forth, and then all of a sudden he stopped and we could go ahead. It. was. strange.

Anyways, we ended up going back across the bridge and are now sitting inside a hotel (thank you Jesus!) and we're both really tired and ready for bed. It's been a long day, we were in the car around 13 hours today...but its all ok now, now we can sleep...goodnight all!

Quote(s) of the Day:
(as we were walking out the restaurant in hickville Nevada)
Kathryn: Was everyone staring at you when you walked in too?
Katie: Yeah, it was strange.
Kathryn: Well, you have your hair brushed so you do kinda stick out.

Fun Mormon Fact of the day: The first group of Mormon pioneers to come to the Salt Lake valley only included five women and children in a group of a 100 or so men.

Questions to Ponder:
What is "fancy ketchup" and why does ketchup not labeled fancy taste the same?
Where did the saying "one horse town" come from?
We know Disneyland is in California, but where exactly in CA?