Middle of Nowhere

Where does America's best tasting water come from?

A beaver. Make of that what you will. Believe me, you see all kinds of signs marring our nation's highways. More about water and beavers on down the road. The snapping of this particular photo turned out to be prescient (look that up, teabaggers, if you even know what a dictionary are).

Roaring through Utah, just short of Provo, we saw this huge grain elevator going up only to find out it was yet another Mormon Moroni monument*. An LDS church rising out of a hay field and into the heavens to the tune of about half a billion dollars. Oh yeah, Mitt would have straightened America out.

*Not be outdone, Cardinal Roger Mahoney (rhymes more or less with "Moroni") tore down L.A.'s historic Catholic cathedral and built a massive new "Our Lady of the Angels" mother church dubbed the "Rog (raj) Mahal", which he'd fly to in his private helicopter. What would Pope Francis say about that?

Even Provo's local Elks Lodge, of which we are members, is rather stately, rising like a Mormon temple. We didn't go in but there's was no reason since they probably don't serve booze anyway.

By the way, a great RV and tent campground is found at Utah Lake State Park in west Provo. Utah Lake is the third largest lake west of the Mississippi and it's what remains of ancient, huge Bonneville Lake for which the Bonneville Salt Flats are named. Wow. Fascinating.

Next day we shoot through Salt Lake City like poop through a goose, grabbing a quick freeway sign of Temple Square which is to Mormonism what Mecca is to Islam, the liquor store to Catholicism, Fox News to teabaggers, and bird watching to wimpy liberals.

Then it's off to the middle of nowhere on I-84 from Utah into Idaho. No one told us (and there's no highway signage) that there would be no gas for about 100 miles. And when you're towing a 12,000-pound trailer with a four-cylinder Prius you're only getting about nine miles to the gallon and frequent gas stations are much appreciated. So Utah or Idaho or Obama, how about a simple sign that says "Next gas, 87 miles."

 

And, running on fumes, here's where you finally find that next gas...

literally in the middle of nowhere.

"Middle of Nowhere" is a gas station with a curio shop, a café, a cool little donkey, a llama, with regular unleaded for a whopping

$4.65 a gallon. The place was packed. This guy has a gold mine here in the middle of nowhere.

This spot in the road is also called "Sublett, Idaho" named after Mountain Man William Sublette who stopped here to gas up in 1843.

We probably didn't piss off nearly enough people with this abbreviated blog post or did we? We cut it short because Paul is off to a clinic for stage three of his sex change surgery in downtown Wendell, Idaho, our next stop. This is for all you Wendells out there.

Bye bye. Buy Starbucks.