Salt Lake City Day 1

On Friday morning, I got up bright and early to make sure that I was ready to go. One of my friends picked me up and then we headed over to our other friends house, where we were leaving from. We left for Salt Lake City around 8:30 am.

Upon getting in the car, my friends handed me a clip board. On the clip board were a few things. First, a description of every passengers duties. And then of course there were some fun travel games. We had the letter game, the license plate game and of course we made up some of our own games. 

I was the back seat passenger. So my duties included trash collection, games and getting everyone food. 

 I won the letter game with a come behind victory. It was a true Cinderella story. And we saw well over half of the state license plates, with a few bonus plates from Canada and Mexico. 

We made a few stops along the way. Our first stop was in Laramie, WY where as we drove into town, there  were two men measuring the street with a tape measure. It was quite the scene. We also stopped somewhere in between Laramie and Rock Springs, WY because the transmission on the car was getting a little hot. Between the wind and the passes we were going over, the car was having to work extra hard, so we pulled over to let it cool off for a few minutes. 

After the small pit stop, we were back on the road towards Rock Springs, WY. We stopped there for gas and then made our way to Salt Lake City. Once we were in Salt Lake City, we went straight to the downtown area to find our Hotel. 

We stayed at the Shilo Inn which is haunted. This is one of the reason's my friends picked this particular hotel. And we were told by more than one person who actually lives in Salt Lake City that it was haunted. In 1978, a lady decided that her life was no longer worth living and threw her kids and herself off of one of the balconies on the 11th floor. Only one of the kids survived. So now the kids and the Mom haunt the hotel. 

A few weird things did happen while we were there, but we never heard the laughter of kids like most of the stories say you do. I don't think we were there long enough though. We were constantly on the go. 

Once we were settled into our hotel, we headed out to get some dinner. We decide on Red Rock Brewery. It was really good. And for a Friday night, it wasn't all that busy, so that was nice. I had a fired mushroom pizza. It was really good!

After dinner we decided to walk around a bit more, which was nice since we had been in a car for nine hours already that day. We came across these signs and flags all around downtown. We thought they were hilarious. And of course made fun of and joked about them the entire trip. We even contemplated stealing one of the flags and bringing it back home with us, but later decided that we didn't really have any use for it. 

After wondering around for a little bit and finding a Starbucks, we started searching for a liquor store so that we could buy a cork screw to open the wine that we brought with us. We thought finding a liquor store in Salt Lake City was going to be difficult, but there was actually one a few blocks down from our hotel. The funny part though is that they can sell you the alcohol, but they can't sell you anything to open it with.

But the lady at the liquor store did tell us that most of the hotel gift shops sell cork screws because they know that the liquor stores can't sell them. So we found a gift shop at the Hilton Hotel that was right across from ours and luckily they had one. Good thing, because if not we were going to have to take our bottles of wine down to the bar that was in the hotel and ask them to open them. And we weren't about to do that. 

A little later in the night we met up with another friend of ours and walked around town a little bit more. We went to City Creek Center, which is an outdoor mall. It was really pretty all lit up. And then we walked over to see the Temple all lit up. 

After that we headed back to our hotel and played a few card games that we tried to turn into drinking games. It worked until we ran out of wine. Damn! We went to bed shortly after this. 

Overall it was a great first day. We got to see a lot of the city and we had a lot of fun. Come back tomorrow to hear about our second day in Salt Lake City. It was definitely the most eventful day of our trip. Have a great day everyone!