Life Elevated – Days 1 & 2

Utah’s tourism slogan is “Life Elevated”.  I’ve just completed my mission to log at least one geocache in each of its 29 counties by motorcycle.  It was a fantastic journey seeing unbelievable and unworldly like terrain traveling many first class motorcycling miles with the tremendous bonus of having my son, Yancey, riding along with me.

I began my journey Friday, August 9^th, leaving the town house a little after 6:00 am.  I headed south toward Boise and decided to take Highway 55 through McCall rather than Highway 95 through Weiser and Payette.  I stopped for a couple of geocaches before stopping in the park at Riggins for a longer break.  By this time it had begun to get very hot.  Anticipating the hot weather I was wearing a mesh jacked and mesh pants.  Each morning I would begin the journey with a sweatshirt and bicycling windbreaker under my jacket.  As the day heated up I would first remove the sweatshirt and then the windbreaker.  This system worked pretty well.  However, this first day I was wearing some light nylon cargo pants under my mesh motorcycling pants.  That did not work well.  I soon felt like I was wearing screen wire underwear.  For the rest of the trip I omitted the cargo pants and the situation was much improved.  There was a lot of traffic from McCall south but most of it was on coming so it wasn’t too bad.

My destination this first day was Gooding, Idaho, where I would spend the night with son, Clint.  I arrived at his house around 4:00 pm having logged 376 miles, tired and hot from the Interstate ride from Boise.  It was great to get a shower and clean up a bit.  As usual, Clint showed me great hospitality and had a chicken ready to grill.  After a delicious dinner and good night’s sleep I was on the road the next morning before 7:00 am (I was now in Mountain time and would be for the duration).

The first part of this day wasn’t much fun because it was all Interstate and a lot of it right into the rising sun.  After a little over an hour I took a break with a cache just after my turn southeast toward Salt Lake City.  Further down the road I stopped at a very nice Rest Stop where two caches were located.  These were my last Idaho caches heading south.

My first Utah cache was in Snowville which is a fuel stop as well.  This was my only cache in Box Elder County because I had logged other caches in this county on other trips.  I got a couple of neat caches in Cache County and had lunch where one was located at a park with a fishing pond in Wellsville.  This was a little side trip from my Salt Lake destination so I had to retrace some miles back to the Interstate.

Yancey’s wife, son, one daughter and my oldest son, Murray, visiting from Philadelphia were accompanying him to Salt Lake for a visit with his mother and step father.  Yancey had planned to trailer his bike to Salt Lake but it was too tall for the trailer so he ended up riding from Denver.  His trip wasn’t too pleasant as he encountered a lot of high winds in Wyoming.  My ex-wife, Linda, graciously arranged lodging for Yancey and me at the University of Utah (where her husband teaches) Guest House and gave us a nice dinner at their house in Emigration Canyon.  The family visit was a great send-off for our adventure.  Yancey and I got a couple of caches after dinner on the way to the Guest House so he would have Salt Lake County out of the way.  I had traveled 329 miles that day.   Pictures 1-Clint and his new lawn, 2-lunch in the park, 3-the Hobbit cache, 4-dinner with family, 5-Yancey at the Guest House (To be continued)  M/W