Along the way in Utah

From the Tetons we headed south to Bear Lake and Garden City, Utah. We'd hoped to check out Jackson Hole, but I still wasn't feeling great so we just drove through so we could rest a bit that night. Bear Lake itself is really pretty, but seems better suited for watercraft than swimming. We stayed at the Traveland RV park, which was a great place to stop along the way.

Impressed with the big dandelion-like flower, which we had to stop for along the side of the road. (This is where my parents get a big laugh, as apparently I did this to them a lot as a kid, too.)

Sitting to watch the deer; we missed the moose, but apparently one was just there.

Yes, this did freak me out when it crawled up my leg, and gave the kids a good laugh!

They had a good playground, and nice staff that lent us a basketball for the night. We also got nice and sandy playing badminton. One of the benefits of a 'down day', with no sights on the agenda, is watching the kids play together. I loved watching my teen teach his little brother to make a basket. Sweetness.

Leaving Garden City we took the vertical hwy 89 towards Salt Lake. We made it up this at a whopping 25 miles per hour, holding our breath the entire time. 

The highway was very scenic.

I'm putting another 'along the way' stop we made in this post, as we had another one after we left the Salt Lake area. Traveling south we pulled over for gas at Scipio, and there was a petting zoo at the gas station. This was seriously better than any petting zoo I've been to before (and when the kids were little I feel like we did a lot of that sort of thing). 

They had zebra, alpaca, goats, chickens, baby peacocks, longhorn cattle, and more that I didn't venture around to see. If a rainstorm didn't come pelting through we would have stayed longer, but we enjoyed the silliness while it lasted. 

The park manager noted his love of the birds, and presented him with a peacock feather. That made for one happy kid!

That night we camped in Beaver, at the DeLano hotel. It was rather sparse, but we could walk to the grocery store and town. They also have the best-tasting water in the nation (not my personal opinion, though I did think it was fine, but there's actually a contest for this).

Utah in general has a lot of cool old signs still in use.  

They also laid claim to the Butch Cassidy birthplace, but we think that this was a bit of a stretch as we couldn't find anything. Later, in perusing our tour books, we read that most places in southern Utah make some claim about Butch Cassidy. We tried to explain to the kids why this was made into such a big deal, but couldn't come up with anything. Is it just the Robert Redford thing that romanticized a bandit? Something else we're missing?