Everybody’s out for Labor Day Weekend

Friday (Sep 2)

Still pretty awesome here in the morning, I sure hope I hope there are no more weird fuse screw-ups that make me drive back to the Sprinter place. [There aren’t!  hooray!!]

As long as I’m a paid park visitor I drive over to the next camping loop where there is an official swimming beach. All of Williard Bay is blocked off from the body of the Great Salt Lake to keep it fresh. I can understand why they would want to do that, but I am a little disappointed. No weird buoyancy, no comparison to Mono Lake … oh well, next time. I take a little swim in the choppy after-storm waters, then head off on my merry way to find breakfast and wifi.

Today’s theme turns out to be Utah establishments lying about having wifi. Yelp told me of a nice-sounding restaurant. Parking was difficult on a busy highway, so I carted my laptop a half block, did NOT bring my book since I would be on the computer, then … no wifi. I was cranky and annoyed and the waitress suffered a little.

They did have some gimmick were you could text a number and offer your opinions on the service and food, so I offered my opinion on the Big Lie they told on Yelp. We talked past each other for a few messages until I sent a screenshot of the Yelp page and they seemed genuinely pleased to know what I was talking about.

The sandwich was pretty good though…. then, a short 30 minute drive through beautiful Brigham City (Mormon towns ARE really quite tidy and peaceful seeming), then north on Utah 38 put me at:

It’s a pretty nice place, but not very user-friendly for me. Hot springs are for soaking in the cool of the evening, but camping here is very expensive and there’s no place else for miles.

Hot springs in the afternoon sun just isn’t that awesome of an experience for me. The very hottest pool had a shade structure, but the ambient heat from the afternoon sun made it uncomfortably hot. When I arrived a Japanese tour bus load of folks were everywhere, every possible piece of shade was packed with middle aged Japanese folks. An hour later they left and the cool spots opened up. I got to spend some time in the coveted under the hot waterfall spot.

The drive from here to Logan is very pretty. They have these big, wide, prosperous valleys here. My road runs a coupla hundred feet up along the edge of the hill so I had a great view of the valley. At a gap I join Utah 30 West. into the next big wide valley, which is Cache Valley, which was a big-time beaver trapping area back in the beaver hat days. The Logan River spreads out into a lovely marshland in the middle of the valley, the kind of thing that makes you wish me had a kayak.

There was nothing really for me to do there. There’s no trails, I don’t have a boat, but place really calls to me from previous trips for some reason, so i stopped there for a while before heading on in to Logan.

Logan really appeals to me. It’s very neat and tidy and proper like any good Mormon town, but it also has Utah State University, so there are hipsters zooming around on their road bikes.

I had a funny interaction:  Even though it’s late afternoon I had my heart set on an Americano at the Caffe Ibis, a hip little joint I stopped at both other times I passed through here. So, struggled through downtoiwn rush hour traffic, parked, toted my laptop in (again!), found a seat, picked out my goodie, made my order … I had my hand on my wallet ready to pay when I off-handedly made sure their wifi worked. The check-out girl sez “We don’t have Wifi anymore“. The dreadlocked espresso dude chimed in with “We disconnected it because we want people to talk to each other“.

That was so NOT what I needed at that moment that I kind of snapped. I cancelled my order and mildly rebuked them for not updating their Yelp page to say no wifi. This seemed to traumatize the checkout girl. Remember that this day started with my breakfast place lying about their wifi. So I ended up getting my wifi at a chain donut shoppe down by the the local chain hotel. To my amazement there were like three pickups for a dozen donuts on Friday evening. Fall semester has started at the University, so I imagine they were for kickoff meetings for the French Club, that sort of thing.

There is still plenty of daylight, so I head up the hill on 89, past the Utah State campus on my left, on a plateau a few hundred feet above town. I will probably lose phone bars soon, so I stop at the lookout to plan my campsite search using the helpful National Forest map posted. It IS Labor Day Friday, so this may not be easy. Traffic out of town is busy and aggressive – lot of people wanting to get to Bear Lake to start their weekend partying.

 

I stayed here before and wasn’t too impressed. I first tried the nicer sounding campground a few miles beyond, but it was full. I had a heck of a time making the left back onto the busy highway to return to Bridger, but I did it, and happily there were still a couple of empty sites there.

I did a drive-thru of the small campground and decided my best bet was a site on the highway side. It caught the full afternoon glare and the highway and its noise were directly across the creek – not too awesome. On my little tour I had noticed  a picnic table that didn’t seem to belong to anybody, so I investigated and discovered an unoccupied site in the trees. Its parking spot was kind of joined to the parking spot of another site so it was easy to overlook. I picked up and moved there, and it was very nice!

There is a general amped-up feeling in the air of the start of a three day weekend. Plenty of barking dogs of course. I have a pretty nice evening exploring the area.

8:30-ish, after I had tucked myself into the van for the evening, a truly unfortunate even happened. There was a rap on the door, and it was the camp host, come down from his site at Spring Hollow, to check my Senior Card – really!?!! It went badly. I wasn’t happy but I produced my card and drivers license as demanded and he chose to give me a hard time about the signatures not matching. Eventually he left, but I was steamed. I stewed on it for a few days, and eventually wrote a crabby letter to the management company (of course there’s a management company, that kinda nonsense wouldn’t happen if the Forest Service managed it) and the Forest Service. Felt better and was able to put it behind me after that.

Saturday

I am still pissed about the asshole Camp Host, but putting that aside, it’s real nice here on Saturday morning. The “start of holiday” vibe is still there, I can feel the cheerfulness radiating from my neighbors … and their yappy dogs … Uh oh, the folks with the dogs are starting to crankup oldies music, maybe it’s time for me to get going…

I’d forgotten how long and exhausting the drive up Logan Canyon is. This is I think my third trip through here over the years. Intense holiday traffic makes it way worse. Very pretty though. Another of those canyons that would be just awesome if there weren’t a busy highway running up it. But then I wouldn’t see it at all if there were no highway, so … there you are …

Garden City, gateway to Bear Lake, was full to the gills of holiday lunch-eaters – the Mexican place had like 25 Harleys outside. The two ice cream places had lines of 15 or so folks at each, that sort of thing. Thanks to Yelp I lucked into a really nice lunch place on the northern edge of town – Coffee and Crepes. The Universe blessed me on this one. I had milled around at the overlook and poking around downtown without a care in the world getting there, and it turned out they closed for the day about 15 minutes after I got there, 1/3 the way through my spectacular ham and cheese crepe (2 pm). 20 minutes later and I would be having a sad day instead of a happy day :) Thanks Universe!

Time to see how the Universe feels about me finding a place to sleep tonight. I drive down the west side of Bear Lake, past a really nice-looking huge and crowded swimming beach, then round the south end of the lake through Laketown, the up the east, less populated side. The first Utah state beach takes reservations so I don’t have much hope there, but the next two are not reservable. I’m pinning my hopes on them.

Sure enough, first on has a “Full” sign. Next one, Cisco Beach, is quite long, 40-odd campsites strung out single file along the shore. I start at the first entrance and work my way north in the campground, parallel to the road. The path I am driving mostly just a very clear spot on the bedrock along the lake. Pretty rough going. Early on there is an unoccupied site. It’s not particularly awesome, but it relieves my stress about tonight, my downside is covered. The next site north has a Mexican Pentecostal baptism going on. Interesting no doubt, but I keep going …

I pass two or three sites of varying un-attractiveness. After stewing for a while at the north end of the campground I backtrack to the most spacious site. No shade or windbreak of any kind, but a nice picnic table, and some distance from my neighbors and the road. I bump and lurch my way across the 40′ of hardpan to park facing north – so my door is away from the sun. Near dusk I drive a bumpy half circle to face south, to fae the rest of the sunset and to be shaded from the sun in the morning.

Turned out to be … interesting, but all in all, interesting in a good way.

Campgrounds on Big Weekends are always a trial, sort of like New Years Eve at the bar – all the amateurs are out. Crowded and noisy. The pit toilets get really nasty. The trash bins overflow. Every third site has way too many people partying hard.

Tonight there is a nice Hispanic family to the south and a nice white family two sites north. I started out started out not happy with the white folks because they were running their generator in the empty site between us, but after an hour so they moved it, so now I’m very happy with them! The Hispanic dad and I exchanged pleasantries, so we’re all good.

The internet tells me that this particular campground is a snorkeling hotspot, so I decide to unearth the snorkel, mask and fins that reside in my back left overhead compartment and give it a whirl. The good news is that I haven’t cleaned out that compartment for years(!), so I discovered a couple of cool things – my even older swim trunks and a couple of tarps I thought were gone. Cool!

But snorkeling was a giant FAIL. The beach is sharp rocks, and the wind is onshore, so it’s very hard to move and little 2′ waves smack into you every few seconds. It was hard enough to get out there just to float around, but to come back, put on fins and snorkel/mask and get out there again was exhausting. I did get out there, but soon realized that my old, tired respiratory system simply was not up to it. I would submerge and start to breath through the snorkel, but had worked so hard to do it that just couldn’t get enough air. It was a good try, but I gave up. Wait for calm water to engage on late life snorkeling. I was in fact exhausted when I got back to my picnic table.

A truly dumb thing happened a few minutes later. A couple of clueless 12 year olds had their dad’s long axe, and were chopping limbs off the only tree within 80 yards, a 15′ tall mesquite(?) tree. I chased ’em off. I felt a little at risk, a couple of glowering, husky brown kids with an axe, but they were were just kids, and obeyed the adult. Then the guy from the next campground north backed me up.

The family to the south all piled into their truck and went somewgere around 4.

At dinner time the guy from the north popped over to see if I wanted some dinner – heaping paper plates of their leftover spaghetti and salad. Little did he know that hoovering leftovers is one of my specialities. I sat at my picnic table eating homemade spaghetti sauce and salad and watching the sunset colors over Bear Lake. Not bad!

Turns out the folks to the south had gone collecting their relatives. At the tail end of sunset they returned, and had multiplied from one truck’s worth of people to four trucks. Kind of annoying. It cut short my sitting in the dark and looking at the lake time, because of all the headlights they kept on to set up their tents. But they were such a good natured bunch and having such a wholesome family time I couldn’t get too worked up about it.

What turned out to be a season-changing cold front came though about this time. The wind started gusting pretty fiercely and spatters of rain. That put everybody next door in overdrive. Flashlights all over the place as the manly men carry big rocks back to hold down the tents. I put up my privacy screen (my bath towel clipped to a couple of handy hooks), and lost touch with the action and went to bed.