Day 11 - A Stop in Ogden

Day 11 (July 9)
One of our best days ever; even if the drive was not much to be excited about.

We left Moab at 8:20 with a cool 70 degrees and headed to Ogden, 270 miles to the north where we arrived at 1:15 PM where it was 93 degrees.

Shortly after we left, we got a call from Jeff who was visiting his girlfriend, Gillian's, parents in New Jersey. He told us that he had proposed marriage and Gillian accepted. Yahoo; we are so happy. We've seen Gillian twice now; once last Christmas, and again in June just after they finished their 2nd year of law school. They go to the same school and met two years ago; they were friends for the first year and became boyfriend/girlfriend this past September. We absolutely love and adore Gillian and are thrilled that they found one another. I have a nice picture of the two of them last month, but it must be on my home computer. Here is one from last Christmas.


Back to the trip
With the extended drought and excessive heat, a number of wild fires have broken out in the west. Utah has the biggest fire in its history (over 400,000 acres I believe). We definitely saw the effects in Arches National Park as the light was dimmed by a smoky haze over everything.

We were driving away from that fire but evidently were close to another; as the highway (191) parallelled a river we saw a helicopter swoop down and hover over the water to pick up a load to carry to a fire that must have been east of us. I had a great view of the helicoper hovering over the water, but couldn't get in on camera because we had passed it. But here is one image I got as it was closing in.



Although we had left the Transcon, I didn't see why it should stop me from taking train pictures!

Our hotel in Ogden was just a couple of blocks away from the historic old town, 25th street. We didn't eat here, but if the food is half as good as the sign... At the end of 25th Street is Ogden Union Station. Inside the station are 5 museums; we perused the railroad museum (big surprise), the model railroad museum, and the antique car museum. We had a couple of interesting docents leading tours. In the car museum, we were shown a license plate from 1944 when metal rationing meant no metal license plates. The gude asked me what I thought the plate was made from; I said "sheep skin". He misheard, looked at me and exclaimed "Cheesecake?!". He figured I was a total loss and turned to Carla for the answer. The correct answer was an early plastic.

I got behind the "wheel" of a locomotive cockpit where Carla grabbed a snap.
Outside, were a number of locomotives, cars, and cabooses. Carla liked this one: