6/21/2018

Baker City, OR to Ogden, UT.

Despite some minor problems (car in a pond, card-keys that would not work), the breakfast buffet was actually very good.  And given our tendency for late starts, we had the breakfast area to ourselves.

We were soon on our way southeast bound on I-84 headed for Boise with Cheryl’s sister Carol taking a turn at the wheel.  The early cloudiness of Baker soon turned to lovely partly cloudy skies.  Boise has the look of a city on the make.  Its freeways  and overpasses look new, there are lots of new and well-built commercial and industrial complexes along the freeway, and you see lots of big houses and new cars as you drive along.

And once out in the open country, the speed limit is 80 mph, and if you nudge that up to the 85-90 range, you can really cover some ground!

Photo 4998.  Love those Idaho speed limits!

I think of the Snake River Plain as a wide flat semi-arid land that is not the most exciting place in the world to travel through.  But this time, there was so much green out there, green crops in the fields, green grass along the roads … even un-irrigated sections of the country had quite a bit of green so that vistas across the valley were often very appealing.  In this part of the country, you are OUT of the city!

Photo 4992.  Green fields and distant mountains on the Snake River Plain

Photo 5001.  A more subtle understated, yet still very beautiful landscape

After reaching the sections of I-84 near the Utah border, Cheryl noted that we were on the bottom half of the tank and we had a long empty stretch of freeway ahead.  Were we in trouble?  Some checking of the map indicated that we were not in trouble, but it was nearly 50 miles to the next major town.  On the other hand, everyone knows that the bottom half of the tank goes down much faster than the top half.  And of course this situation reminded us all of the last time we were traveling together in California when Carol noticed that the gas gauge was WAY down, and when we took the first exit we came to and drove into a isolated little town, the warning light came on “running out of fuel”!  As if our anxiety state was not high enough already!  I didn’t even know that there was such a warning light on our car!  On that occasion we got 403 miles on that one tank of gas (I just looked it up), which was a record.  Today, it was only 393 miles, so no big deal.  In fact I was quite pleased that we went that far without running out of gas while driving at 85 most of the day!

Photo 5005.  Never thought I’d be so glad to see Tremonton, Utah … with the needle on “E”.  The mountains weren’t half bad either!

Tomorrow: the Ogden train museum in the morning, then on to Grand Junction, Colorado.