After spending a few days in Yellowstone National Park we thought we'd seen enough of Wyoming and decided to head south towards Utah. I wrote about our visit in Grand Teton National Park along the way in my last post, where I also mentioned that we took the scenic US-89 south from there. The road didn't disappoint with its scenery, in Wyoming we drove through endless gorges and plains and after crossing the border to Idaho we got to enjoy the views over Bear Lake. The lake continued all the way to Utah where we stopped to appreciate it from a viewpoint just south of Garden City. The viewpoint was actually on a rest area on the eastern side of the road and even though the information desk there was closed we were able to pick up a good amount of brochures of the surrounding areas. We also saw quite a few hummingbirds there which was nice because neither of us has ever seen them from up close before.

We followed 89 all the way to Logan where we stopped to spend a night at Walmart's parking lot. We like those, they're free, there's a proper toilet there and we get to do our shopping really easily. The next morning we returned to 89 just to let it take us to I-15, which eventually brought us to Salt Lake City. We didn't really have much of an idea of what we were going to do there, but we wanted to see the "Vatican of the Mormons" anyway, out of general curiosity. Finding a place to park for free was surprisingly easy, although the spot we picked on a one-way street (a straight continuation of North Temple to the east) was allowed for just two hours. We walked to Temple Square and went around the massive temple without going in. I'm not sure if the Mormons allow that anywhere. We saw the Salt Lake Tabernacle (some sort of a music hall) from the inside, but we had gotten such a late start that we had missed the daily free musical performance. Next we stumbled into the visitor center just next door and walked around the exhibits showcasing, among other things, some important chapters of Jesus Christ's life. These were done with large photographs where Jesus looked exactly like Christian Bale on a bad facial hair day. I half expected him to go "I'm Batman". It was weird… We spent most of our two hours here because we found that they had a somewhat working free wifi. It was a little difficult though, because we were constantly harassed by excessively friendly young women. The "Sisters" go in two's all around the Temple Square with flags of different countries attached to their chests, asking people in several languages how they're doing and if they need any help with anything. We're from Finland, where everyone ignores everyone else, so this was very strange for us.

I'm not exactly sure how the two hour parking limit works in the countries where they don't have any ways to let the people checking the car know when it was parked. We use a blue plastic thing with a white disk that has different times printed on it like on the face of a clock. It's simple and it works. We didn't want to find out how the system works so we just got back to the car and moved it to another street to get two hours more of free parking. We found ourselves close to the State Capitol building and went to see it from the outside. Nearly needless to say it was substantially smaller than the huge Church Office Building next to Temple Square. Everything in downtown Salt Lake City seemed to be polished and perfect and it had a certain small town feel to it even though there are 1.2 million people living in the metropolitan area. Apart from the ginormous Church Office Building there were hardly any buildings that had more than a few stories to them. There were one family houses everywhere we looked, with yards and small picket fences only a couple blocks away from the Salt Lake Temple. There were neat little parks that had opening hours. There was no trash or graffiti anywhere. We could park our RV for free!

Trying to get our heads around the strange tranquility of the big city, supposedly brought forth by the Mormon faith, we headed to see to St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral to get a small taste of something familiar. Far from a church at home, it was still a pretty basic Catholic Cathedral, one of many we've seen on this trip. It was recommended in our guidebook, as was our next destination, the Family History Library that "contains more than 3.5 million genealogy-related microfilms, microfiches, books and other records gathered from more than 110 countries". It was also free. We went in and were immediately confronted by another excessively friendly person, asking us how were doing and if there was anything she could help us with. We had pretty much just come to nose around, so we agreed to the four minute introductory video they wanted to show us. We learned that family is very important to Mormons and that learning about one's ancestors is almost a civic duty and that getting started was really simple and we could get all the help we needed. However, if truth be told, we weren't very interested about that. Also, we only had about 45 minutes of parking time left, so we exited inconspicuously. Luckily our next target, the Church History Museum, was closed for renovations, so we had some time left to use some more free wifi at the visitor center. Once again we got harassed by young women, one of whom actually spoke Finnish. Luckily just a few phrases though, such as "Mitä kuuluu?" (What's up?) and "Kirkko on totta" (The Church is true). Luckily is because we didn't want to hurt her feelings by telling her that we really didn't care to join her religion and were there just to leech on their wifi…

After that we were pretty much done with the city and thus headed back to I-15 to make it a little further south. I mentioned that there are 1.2 million people living in the metropolitan area of Salt Lake City and it seemed that most of them were on the motorway with us. I have never been on such a congested motorway and this was apparently just normal afternoon traffic. There were six lanes going our direction and too many cars to count. It would have been incredible if it hadn't been so horrible. We made towards south at slug speed and got off the interstate at Payson where they had another Walmart allowing overnight parking. Another great thing about camping at Walmarts around the country is that although there are huge amounts of them spread out all over, their number is still limited. Thus, if we want to park for free we can just take out a list of Walmarts and plan our trip accordingly. The search for freedom is the main thing that has gotten us to do three road trips during the last few months, but too much freedom is something we can't handle. How do you choose from infinite options?

When in doubt, go to a Walmart.