After a 6 hour drive to Salt Lake City, Utah, a nights stay there, and another 3 hour drive north. Here we are in Declo, Idaho. Time to backtrack a bit so I can tell you a little about our last few days. Our drive to Utah didn’t consist of too much talking. We were busy taking in all the natural beauty. I’ve never been to Utah, and I’m here to tell you I’ll be back. Between the beautifully snow covered mountains surrounding Salt Lake on all sides to the rivers and natural beauty of the rest of the state (you could spend a week in Moab during the warmer months). It’s a place I’ll be returning to for some more adventure some time later. Other than the beauty of the drive, not too much else exciting happened other than a subway experience in a little town. This is important for two reasons. First, they were out of pickles. Second, they had red Gatorade in their machine that I decided to try. Bad idea, I was reminded on the first sip why I stopped drinking red Gatorade (If you don’t know why, don’t worry about it...)
Also, apparently Colorado is the bean capital of the nation or something. We passed countless bean plants and saw the exact same two trucks completely overflowing with these huge bags of beans 3 times on our drive. This lead to our conversation about properly securing whatever is in the bed of your truck. And here is Erin's Lesson Of The Day! …. Tie your crap down people! The bean trucks did an excellent job as you see below. But the story I shared with my dad of the day Holt almost got ran off the road by someone’s ladder that magically flew out of the bed of their truck. Or how my dad saw a mattress fall over a bridge onto another highway below…and the wreck that it caused ended up killing someone. So, Lesson of the day… spend the money on the bungee.
Enough of that.. The next character that enters our story is Doc. Doc was my Dad’s medic in Vietnam, were they became very close and reunited in 1998 when Doc found my Dad. A little background on Doc, He is a Mormon that was born and raised in Utah. Found his way to Vietnam with my dad. Was a POW (prisoner of war for those of you who don’t know the slang) for several months and escaped by running directly into the fire of his own men, only to make it back and collapse at the feet of one of them. His first memory waking up was the American Flag waving above his head. Once he came home and got better, he met his wife who’s an amazing woman that wrote him a letter a day when he returned to Vietnam to finish. Long story short they now have 6 children and 24 grandchildren…. And the night we were there he wanted his family to finally meet my Dad since they have not been able to on his previous visits. So the night we were there 5 of the children and their children came over and we got to know them for a few hours while hearing some hilarious and crazy stories. I heard the full story of my Dad’s friend Russ for the first time, a guy that my dad has talked about since I was little and I was able to find his name on the Wall when I was up in D.C. earlier this year.
The next day I woke up and went for a run over to the Utah campus. It’s about a 2 mile run from Doc’s front door to the stadium, and it’s amazing how much more you can enjoy a 25 degree run when you’re taking in everything else around you. I also got a little to far out of it because I didn’t pay attention to the road names as I was running so I got a little lost on the way back, but that’s perfectly find because as I was walking trying to figure out where I was I look over and see a scene straight out of A Christmas Story. I literally stopped in awe, because even the little house looked like their house from the movie. So getting lost isn’t always bad….
The only other highlight was getting to eat at Crown Burger, a Salt Lake original that has 5 locations in the area. Started by a Greek family many years ago, they have been on the travel channel a few times and when we were driving the day before my Dad couldn’t stop talking about this burger we were going to try. The crown burger has a special sauce and is covered in pastrami. Sounds gross, maybe, but it sure was good. The onion rings were superb as well, I would suggest everyone try a crown burger at some point.
Quick add on. If you remember reading about Buddy.. he's an escape artist.. and he made sure to show us that he hasn't forgotten his ways. Our plan was to leave at 11 to head to Crown Burger, and at 10:45 as I was taking my bag out, I push Buddy back, open the door, lift my bag, and there he goes... flying under my bag and out the door. He's very smart, he'll stay right around the same area and will come within 5 feet of you only to flick you off and run in the other direction if you approach him. Normally my dad has to feed him something to knock him out and we had it all set up. As soon as he was about to eat the treat full of tranquilizer, Doc opened his back gate and buddy just ran right in. We trapped him! It only took an hour too, which considering some of Buddy's other escapes is pretty good...
We finally left and made it to Idaho, a place that according to my Dad, “they farm on every inch of land they can find” and instead of having signs that say watch for deer, they simply say “Watch For Game”. I’ll save Idaho its own post…. Because it’s a fun little place with some spectacular people.
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