#5BDA Great Salt Lake

What's sort of interesting is that in Grumpy Bulldog Does America I inadvertently went near where a lot of my regular blog readers at the time lived:

• First when I went up to Lexington/Port Huron I probably wasn't all that far from Cindy Borgne
• Then when I went through Chicago I was near Sandra Ulbrich-Almazan
• When I went near Madison, WI I was near Briane Pagel
• In Portland I was near Stephen Hayes, aka the Chubby Chatterbox
• *I was in Northern California, but I don't think near Andrew Leon (thank God)
• One or both of the Geek Twins was in Phoenix and also one of my Facebook "friends"
• *I was in Colorado Springs, a former home of Tony Laplume, though I don't remember where he was in 2014
• And I went through Knoxville, where Rusty Carl was living at that time

But there was only one time when I actually saw one of my blog followers in real life and that was in Salt Lake City when I met Michael Offutt.  There's not actually a picture of this great meeting so you just have to believe me.

I suppose since Offutt was single and didn't have kids it made it easier than meeting those other people.  He rolled out the red carpet with dinner at a nice restaurant, a trip to the aquarium, and some other driving around SLC.  Since neither of us is religious we didn't really go to the big Mormon sites.  He also helped me with my cash flow problem by cashing a check for me, which was good since I still didn't have a working debit card.

I also did some exploring on my own, going a few miles north to the shore of the Great Salt Lake itself, which was freakishly calm that day.

It would have been nice to stay and spend more time hanging out with Offutt and his friends, but I didn't really want to be a fifth wheel, so I continued doing America, heading south to Cedar City.

I was supposed to go to Las Vegas the next day but I had some time so I took a little detour to the mountains around Cedar City and got some of the best pictures of the trip:

And then it was off to Vegas, baby!