2020 Road Trip - Day 2

Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah

I woke up this morning to Chad handing me an espresso that he brewed, turning on the fireplace in the bedroom, and drawing the heavy drapes to let in the morning light. He disappeared for a few minutes while I stayed in bed drinking my espresso and wearing a cozy hotel-provided bathrobe (which can be purchased in the gift shop for $110). I heard Chad talking to someone at the door, and soon he returned carrying a tray and told me, “I ordered room service while you slept!” Over a scrumptious breakfast, we decided we wouldn’t leave the hotel until the staff was forced to drag us out of our room and shove us in our car. We lounged in our room for the next 3 hours and finally, at 11:00, we knew we had to respect the hotel’s check-out time, mostly because we didn’t want to embarrass Amy.

Lobby at the Waldorf

We stopped by the spa to say goodbye to Amy who was hard at work, so we didn’t linger. I had perused the spa menu earlier, and asked Chad if we could get the $506 couples massage in the “relaxing couple’s suite,” but he refused. I was actually glad because we both hate having strangers touch us. The nicest valet in the world brought us our car, gave us a couple of bottled waters, and made us feel like we were the Waldorf’s favorite guests. We left the resort feeling so grateful that we got to experience Park City.

We drove for an hour to American Fork, and the whole way I shrieked at the beauty of every tree and yelled at Chad to “pull over, quick!” so I could get out and take a picture. At first he obliged, but eventually, he just started saying no. His excuses were, “there are 11 semis behind us,” or “there are construction cones lining the side of the freeway,” or “do you not see the 6-foot-tall signs saying ‘No stopping on the freeway?'" So, I just took pictures out the window as we screamed by all God’s creation at 70-miles-per-hour. No, it’s fine. I got some great shots. Like this one:

When we got to American Fork, we stopped at Jack’s Donuts and bought 2 dozen donuts for the employees at Doug Smith Kia to thank them for all the work they did on our car and for helping Jackson and his buddies. Optima Prime was waiting for us when we arrived, but we stayed for quite a while talking to Rick, the employee who’s been working with Chad for the past month. I’m pretty sure he’s Chad’s new bff.

Our next stop was the Enterprise Rent-A-Car next door to the Kia dealership. We returned our rental and the guy waived the one-way fee that’s typically charged because, apparently, everyone in Utah has a master’s degree in customer service and kindness.

For lunch we ate at Café Zupas because Tripadvisor recommended it. There was a long line to order and not many tables available, so I scouted a table while Chad ordered for us. We shared southwest potato and green chile soup, a California cobb salad, and a pumpkin spice crème brulee that Chad referred to as “Disneyland in a cup.” For those who know, it tasted EXACTLY like the Ballroom smells on the Haunted Mansion during the Nightmare Before Christmas overlay. I know you know what I’m talking about.

"Disneyland in a cup!"

Now that we had our car back, we could go anywhere we wanted, and we chose to drive 2 hours to see the Bonneville Salt Flats. It turned out to be one of the least impressive drives we’ve ever experienced. It’s like life cannot exist around all that salt, and everything in the great salt desert is just flat and brown and… salty. I know this shouldn’t be a surprise, but compared to the scenic route we just took, it was disappointing. The highlights of the drive included seeing the Morton Factory with a 50-foot-high mountain of salt piled outside of it, a huge pile of vomit in the parking lot at a rest stop, and… well, I think that’s about it.

We're still learning how to take selfies

We finally arrived at the salt flats. We knew we had arrived because we saw a sign telling us we were there. I had been Googling “how do you know when you're at the salt flats?” just as we arrived, so it was perfect timing. The salt flats are 12 miles long, 5 miles wide, and make up 30,000 acres or about 47 square miles. Chad and I walked on about 12 square feet of it. The salt crust was incredibly hard and flat (duh), and people had carved their names into it everywhere we looked. I was going to lick it to confirm it was salt because what if everyone is just blindly believing a huge lie? But it was also super dirty, and since we're in the middle of a pandemic, I figured I'd just believe it was real salt. Perhaps the clouds overhead created the dingy effect on the salt, but in a matter of minutes we were like, “okay, we can check this off our list. Bye.” And then we kept driving west into Nevada.

Earlier in the day, we had reserved a room in Jackpot, Nevada, at Cactus Pete's Resort Casino. Driving from the Salt Flats to Jackpot, Nevada, according to Chad, is like “eating a generic brand Triscuit.” For hours, we were surrounded by dirt, tumbleweeds, and nothing for as far as the eye could see. And then suddenly, there was a resort in the middle of the desert. We checked into the hotel and worked our way through the labyrinth of 1¢ slot machines toward the elevators that took us to our room on the 7^th floor of the Diamond Peak Tower. The great thing about our room is you can’t quite smell the stale cigarette smoke that wafts through the rest of the casino.

Home for the night

It was past our dinnertime, so we dropped off our bags and headed back down to The Desert Room, one of the casino’s 4 restaurants. We were seated quickly in a booth that faced our fellow diners, so we enjoyed our favorite pastime: people watching. Just as I was telling Chad that my eyes were beginning to sting, and my nostrils were burning from the smoke, I noticed a woman enter the restaurant carrying a tiny 3- or 4-month-old baby girl in her arms. When the baby started to cry, the woman stuffed her into a car seat and aggressively rocked it for the next few minutes. Chad and I removed our masks to eat dinner (shrimp tacos and a quesadilla) just as we heard an elderly woman begin hacking into a napkin. I grabbed Chad’s thigh and we froze, looking at each other with wide eyes. Obviously, we were thinking “COVID,” but the liquid produced by each hack led us to believe this woman’s cough may be the result of 5 decades of smoking the Benson & Hedges that were dangling out of her pocket. Despite the fact that she coughed for the duration of our 30-minute dinner, the food was tasty. And the entire meal cost less than my 2 drinks at the Waldorf last night. Goodbye Waldorf Astoria, hello Cactus Pete's.

-Rachel