Salt Lake City KOA

This was our day of postponement. We are resisting the drive across the flats and heat, so instead, we made it a short travel day and threw in some shopping and city sight seeing. We also got a really lazy late start, pulling out around noon. Richard biked the road around the reservoir, a short but happy ride, and certainly preferable to trying to ride 80 (pretty sure you’re not allowed to anyway).

Quickly following that, we found an upscale shopping center in the heart of ski resort-ville just above SLC. There we faced a small crisis of identity, as we needed to choose between shopping at Whole Foods vs. Walmart. At home, we are Trader Joe’s people except for specialty items. Then it’s Whole Paycheck for whatever we can’t find at the independent health food store. Normally we spend about the same amount for those couple of items as we’ve spent for the rest of the week’s groceries. While traveling, I openly admit that we are people of Walmart. Thing is, we can find exactly what we need, in almost exactly the same store layout, whether we’re in Utah, New York, or Ontario. It’s really really easy to walk in and buy milk, frozen skillet dinners, and maybe some lithium grease and a pair of pants. And anyway, we tried to park in the WF lot, but they didn’t have nearly enough double parking spaces for RVs, so we took our low brow business over to Walmart, where there was lots of parking and at least four huge RVs camped out on the periphery. What better way to follow shopping at Walmart? Pulling into a KOA of course. The Salt Lake City KOA is HUGE. But still exactly like a KOA. Ah, we’re in our element.

For the rest of the afternoon, we did an impressively good job entertaining ourselves by checking out the Utah Natural History Museum. Wowie, this place is very fun! The design and architecture of the building is just beautiful, and the exhibits are high tech and interactive. One of the themes of this trip has been learning about the Laramide Erogeny, the millions of years ago crash between two tectonic plates. The museum had lots of nicely laid out displays showing the dynamics at work and how this event created the landscapes of the western U.S. For example, because a huge part of the middle of North America was an ocean during the Cretaceous period, there are not many land based dinosaur fossils found there. It’s in the Utah and Colorado regions where the conditions were not only right for them to have lived there, but also for the fossils to be exposed due to the erosion of the pushed-up layers of rock. Anyway, the museum in SLC had lots of huge and complete skeletons on display and that was pretty cool. There were other fun exhibits to explore, plus we saw the solar array at the top of the building. Now that would power a 12v fridge for sure. Might be hard to mount on Dory’s roof though.

For dinner we went out. There is a great Indian restaurant called Star of India, which just so happened to be a very short distance from the KOA. Had we known, we might actually have walked. Their tandoori is amazing and we also got a coconut curry shrimp dish that was to die for. The atmosphere is a little funny because it’s the restaurant for a hotel, but the service was great on what appeared to be a slow Wednesday night.

We’re noting this place as an overall good stopping point on any long trips going this way. We’d stay there again and probably eat at the same restaurant again.

Total miles: 49.0, 18.0 mpg, 1 hour 53 minutes. Typical KOA with full hookups. LTE strong and wifi pretty good. Huge place with at least 200 sites.