Traveling to Northern Climes

We made it to Salt Lake City in good time and in good shape, leaving Keller around noon on Saturday and arriving Monday around 1pm. I made plenty of stops along the way for fun walks with the dogs. And as you'll see, the weather slowed us down quite a bit.

We stayed in the Quality Inn on I-40 in Amarillo on Saturday night. It was quite a lucky find as there was an arbor trail behind the hotel with benches and trees and grass verges on either side of a paved path that went for at least a couple of miles in both directions. Even in the dark of night, it was a fabulous place to let the dogs stretch their legs.

It was a beautiful but frigid 11 degrees when we left Amarillo on Sunday morning.

None of these windmills were turning (that is, none were generating any electricity) but I thought they made a nice picture in the early dawn.

Around Albuquerque, the dogs and I took a long hike and they stuck their noses down every prairie dog hole they could find.

After a very long day on the road, we at last ended up in Moab at the La Quinta (super nice and super dog friendly). I knew a winter storm was heading for northern Utah. All the forecasts projected the storm to hit around 11am the next morning. Imagine how shocked I was to wake up at 5am on Monday to take the dogs out to pee only to find an inch of snow on my car.

I immediately moved my entire travel schedule up an hour and revised my scenic route to the more conservative interstate route. This was a good thing because it took me an hour to go the 30 miles from Moab to I-70. I stayed about a quarter of a mile behind a snowplow the entire way as heavy snow continued to fall.

I-70 westbound takes you through some spectacular geology so despite the bad weather, I stopped for a few pictures.
But the weather turned really bad around Salinas. For about 100 miles, visibility was less than a mile and there was thick ice, snow, and slush on the road, often completely covering it. Temperatures were well below freezing so every fat fluffy flake stuck. I had several hours of white knuckled driving.

But we did arrive at last only to find that the GIGANTIC WINTER STORM predicted for the Salt Lake Valley simply failed to arrive, slamming southern Utah in a sneak move instead.

I close this post with a picture of Gracie and Gosia's Blink, 2 yrs old, wrestling. They are both in young dog with too much energy heaven.