500 mile day

Well, we finally made it out of Ol' Arizona and now we're in Nephi, Utah, Milepost 222 plus a few.
Our odometer sez we've driven 497 miles so it's close enough to call it 500.  It was 9.5 hours of drive time so you can do the math--averaged a whisker over 50 mph.

It was a mixed bag of driving conditions--the typical good, bad and ugly.  Beautiful snow covering everything out by Cameron and then a great picnic overlooking Marble Canyon.  Swirling clouds, stunning light, classic Thomas Moran painting.  North of Page conditions were pretty good.  We were both so tired we didn't think we could get past Kanab but a cuppa joe did the trick and we got shot out of the cannon yet again.

Snow started falling in earnest a few miles south of Panguitch.  The 7920 summit of Utah Hwy. 20 was real dicey--the truck almost slid off the road and we had to crawl along at 10 mph for awhile.
We thought I-15 would be better.  HA! No way.  In fact, it got a lot worse on I-15 and it was 30-40-50 mph driving for awhile.  The road cleared for awhile at Scipio but then got real sloppy again just south of Nephi.  That's when we decided to call it quits.

It's still really coming down--looks like movie snow and the parked truck is already covered.  We're staying at The Safari Motel.  They have billboards plastered all up and down I-15.  It's $47 a night including tax.  We have two huge double beds, full bath with a tub, fridge, nice TV and free WIFI.  The room is huge.  There's a nice desk for me to use the computer and the WIFI is password protected.  Rich stuff.

We brought in a lot of stuff from the truck--both Blizzard Boxes, our suit cases, two coolers and lots of flotsam and jetsam.
WHEW--it was one long day of driving and I'm really glad to be off the road.

Tomorrow is going to be real dicey--the only way we can make it home with daylight left to to navigate Salt Lake during the morning "drive-time."  Plus, it's probably going to be pea soup fog with a typical SLC inversion.  What fun, huh?

Anyway, we're roughly 300 miles from home.  Nephi is the classic Fibonacci Ratio in action--62.8% of our trip is done and 38.2% remains!  Ying yang, feng shui and all of that with a sprinkle of Type A seasoning thrown in for good measure.

The coolest vignette of the day was our noon picnic looking out over Marble Canyon into the low swirling clouds.  WOW!  We had guacamole on Wasa crackers--YUM!  There is a LOT of snow in southern Utah.  A LOT!  Way, way more than I had been led to believe.  Some of the roofs still have over 18 inches on them.  We saw some deer that were danged near up to their bellies in snow!

Well, that's about it--we will take some pix (maybe) later and post them up while we are waiting tomorrow morning for the roads to clear.

Thanks for reading & cheers!  J&S