After too many days of planning to write and finding one excuse or another, its time to catch up to today. Well fill in some of the past days later.
our longest drive of this adventure yesterday: 194 miles from Brigham City to Fillmore, Utah. Its a far cry from the days wed drive 700 miles before collapsing for some sleep before doing it all over again to report by the required date. Nevertheless, it is still a chore because we have to hook up to start, then unhook and set up before were done for the day. Most important of all, we really do get to enjoy the scenery when the drive isnt too intense, and thats most of the time.
Yesterday, most of the scenery was from somewhere in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. It almost feels like were in a frying pan - mountains all the way around, miles away, and you cant really see where we came in, let alone where well be driving over the edge. But we know we will. The territory around our drive almost since we left Coeur dAlene has been mostly flat, mostly lush, green farmland through
Missoula and Dillon, Montana. More recently, weve driven through dry sagebrush and what looks like wasteland with few signs of life, and a few stretches of green farmland along the way.
We elected to stay here in Fillmore for a couple days because it a nice sounding RV park around half way between Brigham City and St George, Utah and sounded like another nice place to visit. It is a very nice little town wed never heard about, just about halfway between the northern and southern borders of Utah. And thats precisely the reason Brigham Young decided to plant the city here. He intended it to be the capital of Utah, but subsequent events and the reality of things overruled him.
We learned about that today when we went to the Territorial Statehouse State Park Museum today. Admission was $1.00 for each of us, was well worth the learning experience about the history of Utah, and well out of the way of any big name display in a busy city. It seems Brigham Young planned for Utah to be almost all of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, but the Federal Government had other ideas, and it led to a
small war just before the Civil War. The building was intended to the state capital building, and the current building was only one quarter the size of the intended final building. Original stone works, state rooms, and the upper floor was a grand ballroom with a working piano that guests played to our enjoyment.
In case you wondered why Utah is the Beehive State: When Brigham Young settled here, he planned to name the new territory and state Deseret because that signifies the honey bee. A tenet of Mormon philosophy views the as a colony of bees, with all the people working together for good, sort of like bees in a beehive.
The grounds do include current county offices and a very nice park, with some of the original cabins still standing and though theyre now used only for storage, not tourists. The grounds are beautiful, with quite a few trees getting ready to lose their leaves. This city takes great pride in their heritage.
day by visiting the local supermarket, and that was quite an experience in itself. It was almost like the Safeway type stores were mostly used to, but we didnt have to worry about running into somebody in a hurry or blocking the aisle. As we wandered the aisles, thinking about our menus for the next few days, one of the stores asked us where we were from. We continued to have quite a friendly conversation with him while we finished our shopping.
