We left Salt Lake City sometime by early afternoon. Surprisingly, SLC has a large homeless population. Some of them were hanging out near us. Some of them were figuring out how to survive. I saw a man hawking truck lights to truckers that were leaving a rest stop. He held up an orange light which looked like the type of light that you would find on an ambulance or even a more specialized truck. Whatever it was, he proudly waved it to all of the trucks driving past him. I hope he got something for his troubles.
Our next stop is Yellowstone National Park. I’ve never been there—I put a dot on it on the map to visit it during our planning cycle. The weather was really nice. I was really looking forward to seeing this national treasure. In order to get there, though, it was going to be another not so very interesting drive through some vast farmlands. It was easy enough to get out of Salt Lake City via route 15. For some reason, the highway signs in Utah all had illustrations of a beehive with the highway number inside of it. We were speculating that Utah was proud of its honey production. I asked my husband to look it up, but the cell phone reception was not good. So, it remains a mystery until we remember to do some research on it.
So, here I am driving rather fast on the Idaho freeway. Their speed limit varies between 70 and 80. You definitely have to slow down around construction zones. I decided that I would listen to some modern country music by Big N Rich. They are the band that created “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.” That’s a song that I’m particularly fond of because of the great guitar riffs and the clever lines. I developed a soft spot for country music when I was living in Canada—that’s another story for another time.
The music was really pumping me up and I was driving really fast. Well, apparently, I was driving too fast when I realized that I drove right past an Idaho state trooper. Oops.
Yes, I got a speeding ticket. Sigh. It’s totally my fault, but I was hoping that the trooper would let me slide. Nope. This guy looked like he came straight out of that show about Mayberry in the 50s. I forget that name of it right now, but nevertheless, it was not my best moment on this trip, so far. He asked me sarcastically whether there were any highways in California that had speed limits of 90 (yes, I was going that fast—easy to do in my car). I replied with a statement that people would knock you over on our two-lane Highway 5 if you weren’t going that fast. Apparently., that didn’t impress him. As you can imagine, I was not pleased when he went ahead and printed out my ticket. By the way, we saw LOTS of troopers sitting in wait after I got busted. Warning to drivers going through Idaho: you don't want to mess with the law.
I was honestly surprised that it wasn’t going to cost me that much ($90—a dollar per mile?). Anyway, we let him drive out first and I made a pact with myself to use the cruise control more judiciously—as in set it to no more than 5 miles above the speed limits. Also, I noticed a cool thing in my car regarding the navigation system. It would tell me what the speed limit was everywhere I went. That’s pretty handy! I just need to pay attention to it.
I needed to stop a little bit further up from that incident, get some gas, take a break and process that just happened. We stopped at Idaho Falls. It’s a really quaint little town where people have nice ranch style homes done in brick. The neighborhoods have tall mature tress and everything looked so nice and tidy. We stopped at a funky place that was a car wash, RV wash, and pet Wash all on one spot. At the gas station, people came by and talked to us. There are some really nice people in Idaho (except for that traffic cop—but even he was somewhat nice). As I was getting ready to settle into the driver’s seat of my car, I felt a piercing prick of pain on the underside of my right arm. It suddenly dawned on me that I was just bitten by an insect. I saw the prick which was rapidly getting worse. My husband quickly got some tweezers and pulled out the stinger. Great. Am I allergic to yellow jacket stings? I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out!
My resourceful husband actually had an ointment for this and we rubbed it on. While he was doing that, all I could think about was the yellow jacket infested camp site that we had just left in Salt Lake City. At the time, he was cursing at them as he spritzed some glass cleaner (we were cleaning the bugs off my windshield). He cursed one yellow jacket and told him to tell his buddies to leave us alone. Apparently, the yellow jacket network got a wind of this and that’s probably why I got stung!
I’m really looking forward to Yellowstone after all of this.
