Wyoming, Utah, Nevada

Wyoming was absolutely beautiful. The mountains just keep changing all the time. Sometimes they are different on either side of the highway. I cannot imagine what it took to build the highway, but I am grateful. The scenery was wonderful.

Utah was even different from Wyoming but gorgeous.The drive through Salt Lake City took my breath away. The granite mountains there were different from others I had seen. My ears plugged up in the Rocky Mountains and I still can't hear very well. I have to raise my voice to be heard, which is great for John who insists he is not hard of hearing. Yeah. Right. A sign for a shooting range: "We have machine guns you can shoot." That is just wrong.

Oh. Started to get a cold in Kansas but stopped and took some wonderful medicine....starts with a "z" and ends with a "cam." Where have you been all my life? I feel great now. (This was a commercial.)

Okay. Now lets talk about Nevada. We decided to not stay in Salt Lake City and drive to Nevada for the night. We did see the Great Salt Lake and lots of other pools of water that obviously have salt in them. It was amazing to see some of the ground had salt coming through. Very weird for a girl from Iowa. We stopped in Wendover, Nevada, for the night. I gambled $20 and left with $50. (only good news on gambling so far). We went to our car the next morning to leave early and found it was covered with bugs!! COVERED!! They were like the size of a gnat but more like baby flies. We hurried and got in the car and took off for breakfast. That's when we realized we had a serious problem. They were everywhere inside our car and outside of it. We had to brush them off our clothes to go eat. When we got back to our car it was still covered in bugs. We jumped in and headed down the road. The bugs clung to the car. We had hundreds inside the car and kept rolling down our windows to get rid of them. We didn't realize we were actually letting more in. We drove for about an hour swatting and killing the flies as we drove until we stopped to get gas. The car still had bunches of them so we ran it through a car wash. Now we had CLEAN bugs....we managed to get most off the car but not all of them and the ones that washed off were now clean but not dead. We jumped in the car and took off again. After another couple of hours we stopped for lunch. We had used up all the paper towels and napkins in our car trying to kill the bugs so when we stopped for lunch I grabbed a roll of toilet tissue. John laughed his butt off to think that first I would steal and that second I would steal toilet paper. But we drove on. We got about fifty miles from Reno and we stopped for a break. I went into a WalMart to get bug spray. When I came out of the store, John had unloaded all our belongings into a shopping cart so we could spray inside. It looked like we were homeless people!! We sprayed the car, put everything back inside and took off down the road killing the few that were left. NOT FUN!!!!

We are now at Harrahs in Reno in a very nice room. I have to wonder though what the valet thought about parking our car that smells like bug repellant and with a roll of toilet paper on the passenger's seat. ---Penny