Salt Lake City To Moab, Utah — With Train Wreck Along The Way

It’s been some time since I’ve done a long road trip. But Elisabeth Osmeloski
is getting married down near Moab, Utah — and flying into Salt Lake City and
then driving down turned out to be the easiest way to get there. So on with the
road trip, with the unexpected surprise of seeing a train wreck as well as
ordering lunch by telephone.

I’m Hertz Gold, so my rental car should have been waiting for me. But my
flight arrived early, so I guess that’s why I wasn’t on the board. Over to the
desk I went, where the very nice agent offered me a deal on some of the more
exotic cars.

Usually, I get like the smallest car that’s available. It’s just me driving
around, and I don’t need anything fancy. But for this trip, I’d booked a Mustang
in advance. It’s a road trip, right? And the new Mustangs I found to be kind of
fun, when I was upgraded to one automatically a few trips ago.

That should have been fancy enough, but then I was offered a convertible
Mustang or a Hummer H3. Seriously, a Hummer? How could I even think of driving
something like that. How obscene!

Yeah, I got the Hummer. I’d never, ever rent something like that — but
c’mon, wouldn’t it be fun to drive one. Plus, the agent told me the gas mileage
was about the same as a Ford Escape or the Mustang. As it
turns out, it’s 18 mpg
on the highway to the Mustang’s 19 mpg, so I’m not feeling too bad (the Escape
24 mpg). It is pretty neat to drive, by the way, but nothing special — at least
on the highway. Off-road, maybe it’s a different story.

I was also hungry, so I asked if there was any fast food place along the way
that was unique to Utah. Must discussion ensued, including the concept of
fry sauce, ketchup and
mayonnaise mixed together. Eventually, it was decided I should be sent to
The Training Table in Sandy,
Utah, where you order your food
by telephone.

Huh? Have a look:

OK, first, sorry about the date stamp. My phone reset itself and started
putting these on pictures again. Next, yeah, there’s the Hummer. Now look to the
right. See the phone? Here are more:

You look at a menu, decide what you want and then pick up the phone to call
your order in. Across to, you know, the cashier where you could easily have
walked over and placed the order. Then when it’s ready, the phone rings, and you
– um — walk over and get your food and pay for it. So the point of the phones?
No point, really — though with kids, I bet they love it.

I got a burger and fries. The fries came with fry sauce, or what I gather is
a variant, "dipping sauce" as The Training Table called it:

This kind of scared me. I realize now that I was probably supposed to mix the
mayonnaise in with the ketchup, but that didn’t occur to me. Instead, I thought
I’d just use the ketchup. Sadly, it wasn’t ketchup. It was ketchup mixed with
something else — something spicy I didn’t really like. Sadness, because the
fries were excellent. Then I found real ketchup was available, and I was happy.
As for the burger, sorry, The Training Table fans. Very disappointing. You want
a burger? Try Ruby’s or

Charlie’s Chili.

Lunch done, it was time to hit the road. The mountains near Salt Lake
impressed me by still having snow on them:

Then SMACK! I heard a huge smack on the car and looked to discover my
windshield was now cracked:

Ugh. It’s OK — I got the insurance.

Eventually, it was off the highway and through a long canyon area:

Many very long trains also went past. And as it turned out, two trains had a
collision last month (no
one hurt; lots of coal spilled) which was still being cleaned up, as I passed:

Eventually I left the canyon passes and was on long, straight roads again:

With a nice sunset to come:

Arches National Park tomorrow, then I twitter Elisabeth’s wedding. Heh.