Salt Lake City is a sad place.

We ended up driving for a really long time through Utah getting to SLC.  The majority of the state is desolate, or deserted, or never settled.  There are mountains everywhere though.  Every so often the sights were interesting.  Most of the time it was just hot and empty.

After hours of nothing, someone had set up a Beef Jerky cart on the side of the road!  I didn't even have cell service for hours along this route.  It's a little scary at times, nobody can hear you scream!!

Finally, we arrived in Salt Lake City.  Our hopes to find a small but interesting town diminished fast!  This downtown business district, and even surrounding area, was just depressing!  There were a few bars, a few restaurants, for the most part however they were just chain developments.  Olive gardens, macaroni grills, etc.  Sad.  We had been in the car for 11 hours at this point, so leaving wasn't an option.  We finally settled on an affordable hotel, a few blocks from some local bars and breweries.  A selling point for this little motel was that they all had tempurpedic beds.  Not bad.

That night after checking in was very unremarkable.  Dinner was good, but that's about all I have to say for it.  We hit one local bar, as it had a rooftop and wasn't a far walk, but 20 minutes later we were walking back, exhausted, depleted, and a little let down.

Thursday, July 4 2013.

Happy 4th!  The city is completely empty, except for a few tourists (such as ourselves) checking out the temple.  The mormon temple is the real, and possibly only attraction here.  Seen below are a few shots from the street, and park around the temple.  Non-mormons are not allowed to enter.  The building was nice, I suppose.  They advertised it as being an interesting architectural stop.  I suppose after all the sights we saw, we were just still unimpressed.

The temple itself, best view.  Most of it is obstructed from public view:

Last stop was to pick up coffee, mormon coffee.  After a little bit of judgement after mentioning we were stopping in Vegas from the otherwise pleasant staff, we were on our way.  

Honestly, I can't wait to get out of here.  At least I can say I was here, and I don't need to come back.