Thanksgiving In Park City: Day 1

This is the second year in a row I have gotten the chance to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins here in Park City, UT, so I thought I'd share the experience with you.

The original plan was to leave yesterday around 2 after my roommate got back from riding at Copper in the morning, but unfortunately, getting back took longer than expected so we decided to leave this morning at 7am and ride at Park City when we got here around noon. Once again, the plan did not go well. We ended up sleeping until about 9:30am and decided that we would get there too late and only have about an hour to ride Park City. Thankfully the day ended up being awesome anyway since we took our time on the drive stopping at a few cool spots.

So we ended up leaving The Boat around 10am, making our first stop not on purpose thanks to a police officer. For those of you who read my blog from last Thanksgiving, you'll be happy to know that this police encounter went a lot smoother and without a full search of the car for meth. But Bacon unfortunately still got a $170 speeding ticket, but we were back on the road in no time.

The next was intentional, at the Dinosaur National Monument just outside of Dinosaur, CO. One thing I realized on this trip was the ridiculous amount of towns based on dinosaurs. Vernal, UT is supposedly "Utah's Dinosaur Land" as well as Dinosaur, CO which is pretty self explanatory. I can't remember the town between those two, but they had some dinosaur statues as well.

Before I go on, I will say that I have pictures from the trip but we forgot the cord to plug the camera into the computer, so I'll upload all of them when I get back. I do however have a little video of the awesome view from the top of Dinosaur National Monument and a little glimpse of Vernal with some super cheesy travel music I found on my cameras editing program, so enjoy.

After that adventure, the rest of the drive only had a few more stops for some gas and of course, pictures with dinosaurs. We started rolling into the Park City area around 4ish and decided to head to Salt Lake City for a bit to try to find some cool big city thrift stores that we have been missing in The Boat. And we found a great one.

After a little while of searching around the Salt Lake City campus of the University of Utah, I called my aunt and uncle and my aunt pointed us toward Deseret Industries, a huge Mormon run thrift store off of 1100 E and 2100 S (for those of you who know Salt Lake City). We were initially shocked by the shear size of it, since neither of us had seen a three story thrift store. After making our way upstairs to the men's section, we spent the rest of our time there checking out the four full racks of perfectly organized t-shirt racks, which was another thing that was so awesome about this thrift store; the t-shirts were all sized and in color order, which once again, neither of us have seen.

So after purchasing some gems from Deseret, we crossed the street and walked up a block to Blindside Skateshop to check out what the shred seen was like in downtown Salt Lake, and let me tell you, it's awesome. Blindside carries a number of my favorite brands from Ashbury, to Airblaster, to Comune, not to mention they had a really cool layout with all their boards and bindings on a balcony overlooking the whole store. However, after spending $3 on some awesome t-shirts, we just couldn't bring ourselves to spend any money on the brand name stuff, so we decided it was time to head to my aunt and uncles.

After a quick call for directions and about a 10 minute drive, we arrived at their awesome log cabin style house. We were a little late for dinner but they were kind enough to wait for us we all sat down and caught up over some delicious Wisconsin beer-cheese soup.

So after an intense hula-hoop lesson from my cousin (who is really good at it), I'm currently chillin in their newly refurbished basement before we play some good ol' family games and I pass out from the long day on the road. Hopefully I get to ride tomorrow, but either way it's going to be a great Thanksgiving. Peace.