Our only travel-free day started with Aven losing another tooth! He was happy to hear that the tooth fairy can still find him in Laramie, Wyoming.

We got to spend some time with a lot of extended family at the Lindberg family reunion- the last time we saw most these people was 8-12 years ago. There is a whole new generation we got to meet!

The local Jubilee days festival in downtown Laramie was fun- rides, games, music, cowboy everything- yee-haw! We even got to see cousin Andy’s band playing at the festival in the evening, and while dancing we managed to maneuver the sea of inebriated townsfolk without injury.

We had no idea that there are drive-through liquor stores in Wyoming! Couldn’t resist trying one out.

Today we drove SE from Price to Arches National Park near Moab, UT – the world’s greatest density of natural rock arches. Our jaws remained dropped the entire time we drove and hiked around the larger-than-life red rock formations. Our favorite was scrambling up to the huge double arch. A double rainbow has nothing on the double arch!

We ventured a little north from here through an old ghost town and saw a young antelope grazing alone. We were told there were some petroglyphs and pictographs (not to be confused with pictoglyphs and petrographs) on the cliff faces just past town. There indeed were both- the oldest from 9,000 years ago! It was so silent and a bit eerie looking at the many areas of ancient art. Some markings were pretty recent though- crazy that some people find it funny to deface these old treasures. Many think the proof of alien existence lies in one of the pictographs. Hmm, maybe.

We were in for our longest stretch of driving yet- 7.5 hours from here to Laramie, WY. Our  mission changed to finding enough gas stations and avoiding hitting any night creatures in the Utah and Colorado wilderness! We barely succeeded on both accounts. We saw two foxes, several rabbits, and many deer: our deer sighting count rose to 18. One of the deer was a freshly killed prey, which a large mountain lion was dragging across the street with his teeth!! He wasn’t afraid of us at all as we gazed at him from just a few yards away. The long drive was worth that experience alone!

Cumulative Stats:

• Bags of ice purchased from gas stations: 9
• Aniya’s total use of emergency potty: 4
• Total # times we’ve eaten out: 0
• Total Miles Driven: 1,776.5

We flew out of Idaho and through a few hours of Nevada before crossing into our 5th state: Utah, making a bee-line for the Bonneville Salt Flats!

It felt a little other-worldly being surrounded by the nearly-blinding acres of white salt crust. There wasn’t much relief from the 95-degree beating sun but we were inspired to frolick and flaunt our superhero powers. Next came stick-horse races and donning of bird and butterfly wings, and other general tom-foolery.

The frolicking fortunately only resulted in one bloody nose (Aven’s first- from the hot dry air?), but no bloody knees or elbows or other body parts amazingly (how I don’t know!). Aniya even tried out gma’s travel potty in the isolated emptiness which she seemed to enjoy.

Sorry (but not really), we couldn’t help ourselves with more perspective opportunities:

After seeing the Great Salt Lake and heading through Salt Lake City, Katie got a surprise visit to her childhood home in Sandy Utah! She was overwhelmed by the flooding happy memories of walking where she learned to ride a bike, made bike jumps in the culdesac, and remembering racing the flash thunderstorm rain across the neighborhood…flashing back nearly 30 years is quite a trip!

Road Trip Stats:

• Total Miles Driven: 1,199
• Total construction sites driven through: 16 (two times we sat for 20-25 minutes to get through).