Thursday, September 15 - to Park City, Ut

After breakfast in the hotel ($5 hot buffet), we loaded up and headed south to Park City.  Interstate 80 is now 80 MPH for most of that route and I find it terrifying.  Trucks do 75 and cars do probably 85 or so.  I much preferred the smaller highways of yesterday.  Saw lots of corn, potatoes, and sugar beets along the way.  The west side of the Rockies are magnificent. We stopped in Burley, ID at Conner's Cafe for some "homestyle cooking".  We love these local places where the townfolk all eat.  They had very good burgers, sandwiches and pies. When we got into Utah we began noticing that the farm/ranch homes were much larger and nicer.  There were lots of little towns that had tracts of huge homes and nothing much else around, except the local Morman temple, which are very easy to identify since they all look alike.    We arrived in Park City, UT at 4:00 pm and checked into our home for the next week, the Marriott Summit Watch timeshare (courtesy of an exchange with our Scottish timeshare buddy, Alex Barclay).  This is a 2 bedroom lockoff, so Don and Brenda have the studio side which has its own little kitchen and sitting area, and we have the larger 1 BR side with the full kitchen, dining area and living area.  We just open the connecting doors and have the whole place together during the day.

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir rehearses most Thursday evenings, so we got back in the truck and headed the 30 miles into Salt Lake City and stumbled onto a parking garage right downtown near Temple Square.  We went into the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and had a light dinner in the Nouvoo Cafe.  Nouvoo (Hebrew for "beautiful place") is the town in Illinois from which Joseph Smith and his followers emigrated.  We had half salads and soup, all delicious and very reasonably priced.  Our 2 dinners totaled $17.  By now it was 7:30, so we walked over to the Tabernacle and got in line.  There is no admission, they just were checking purses so the line moved pretty quickly.  We found seats upstairs where we could see the whole scene.  We spent about an hour and it was a wonderful experience.  The last song they were rehearsing was "The Hills are Alive" from the Sound of Music.  I have never heard that sung more beautifully.  We were all enthralled and agreed it was well worth the drive into town.  When we got back to the parking garage, Don put in the ticket to pay and there was no charge.  The first 2 hours are free and we were at 1 hr, 59 min.  On the way back home we stopped at a very nice Smith's market, which is a Kroger store, and did our grocery shopping.  Then back to the unit for the night.