After a leisurely start to our day (I did my exercise and swam while Klep slept in), we checked out of the Downtown Hampton Inn in Salt Lake City and went to Heritage Baptist Church in north SLC where we enjoyed worship with about fifty others as we listened to a sermon on Psalm 7 entitled "A Rock and A Fortress." Following service, we found I 15 and headed to Idaho through the urban sprawl which finally ended after Ogden. Gradually we saw some limited farmland and some old abandoned homesteads.
The settlements became further and further apart as we left Utah and entered Idaho.
We were getting a little low on gas, so we pulled off at a Sinclair station that advertised itself quite truthfully as "In the middle of nowhere."
As we got further into Idaho, we noticed a difference in the rock structures from what we have been seeing this last week. The valleys also got wider and farmland became more common. We saw beautiful fields of potatoes, corn, lentils, and alfalfa. After we got on I 86 headed toward Pocatella, we passed American Falls Lake where the Snake River begins.
The road along here is part of the original Oregon trail. We continued to Pocatella where we found Uncle Jim's Family Restaurant where we enjoyed a belated lunch or an early supper. There actually is an Uncle Jim, but he wasn't there today. Klep had a Greek Salad with hot flat bread and I had chicken souvlaki pita with a tossed salad. 
We completed our triangle by heading south through the lush valleys of southern Idaho exiting the interstate and taking hwy 91 to Logan, Utah where we will spend the night. Klep stopped along the way to pick some alfalfa to show me since this is not something I am familiar with. We have now reduced the number of states that we have not visited to one. It is a little too far to drive to Oregon this trip.
One of the things I have been wondering about is the number of homeless people that were in Salt Lake City panhandling. I really didn't expect that, but I guess this is a fact of life in every city now. By and large, I have been impressed with how clean all the neighborhoods that we have driven through have been whether they were lower or upper socio-economic. It also surprised us how little we saw of farmland until we got to the northeastern section of the state. Much of the flat land in the Salt Lake Valley is taken up with urban development. Where the land is irrigated, we have seen some beautiful alfalfa hay. We also had never realized the amount of the state --70% -- which is taken up by federal land.
Tomorrow we head south where we will resume our National Park visits. We will just have to wait and see what we will discover along the way.
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