Road trip, end of day 2

I got up around 7:00 a.m. in Wendover, Utah, a place which in the light of day looked just as horrid and ugly as it did at night, only without the glamor of the casinos' neon lights. Eating only an energy bar and taking a coffee from the motel lobby, I took off eastward across the Utah salt flats. I got breakfast in Salt Lake City, zoomed into the mountains east of there, and up into the very high desert country. All along, I had great luck with weather. Either the bad weather stayed to the south, or it blew through before I got to a particular spot.

I hit the Wyoming border about 11:30 and all continued clear. It was only after I left Rawlins and started climbing up even higher that I went through my first bit of weather. Around a place called Elk Mountain, I went through about ten minutes of blowing snow and snow showers. But it wasn't bad -- the visibility was never less than, say, half a mile. And it was over in ten minutes. I did see an overturned big rig.

All in all, Utah and Wyoming were really beautiful. There was slow all along the roadside, until I got into far eastern Wyoming, when the land started flattening out and (no doubt) dropping in elevation. I crossed into Nebraska around sunset, and kept going another couple of hours until I got to Ogalalla, which was enough driving for a second day.

In Ogalalla I went looking for a place to eat, and made a really bad choice. I went to a local pizza/pasta place, or that's what the sign said. Inside they had a huge buffet full of the kinds of things you might imaging a high school cafeteria would put together for a soup and salad bar, and they also had everything that was on the menu was also on the buffet, so I said I would do the buffet. The only thing I could really face eating, besides some canned corn, was the pizza. And the pizza was like... Imagine if a church youth group decided to have a pizza night. And a couple of the girls in the group were industrious, and wanted to do it right, so they actually practiced. They made practice pizzas through trial and error for two weeks, and when the time for the pizza night came, they served what I found on the buffet. The choices of pizza were: Cheese; Hamburger; "Special"; and "Taco." The last one was full of canned green olives. Everything was just horrible. Man.

I started uploading pictures I've taken along the way. A lot of them are shot from the driver's seat of my rental car, obviously. A few times I got out into the cold wind and actually took a picture and tried to level it correctly.