Salt Lake City Trip

Two weeks after the fact, I am finally getting my act together and posting photos of our trip to Salt Lake City. Really and truly, it was a marvelous time. Stephen had a planetarium conference that lasted a full week, and I flew in for a long weekend during his conference. Neither of us had ever been, and we were impressed with everything: the city was active, friendly, and vibrant; our hotel was beyond description; and it certainly helps that we were enjoying our vacation and one another without kids. Hurrah!

First off, our hotel. I failed to get a really good shot of it, so I swiped one from their website:

This is the Grand America Hotel, the "only AAA Five Diamond hotel" in the Salt Lake City area. Go to their website and prepare to be insanely jealous of me for like 3 years. Suffice to say, it was the nicest place we've ever stayed. It was kind of a fluke that we even got to stay there, and we felt pretty country in our king bed suite with huge marble bathroom, large sitting area, and nightly turndown service. (Chocolate on my pillow? Yes, please!) I had a happy fit the first morning when I called the concierge and she answered in a chipper British accent with, "Yes, Mrs. Case, how may I be of service?" It was heaven.

Here's the view from our balcony:

(Yes, that was in the hotel! Note that there are no benches. Hmm.)

Steve and I went on many outings together, and I even had a full day by myself. We shopped, explored, and became regulars on Salt Lake City's excellent public transportation system. Most of our destinations were within the free fare zone (what a concept!), so we rarely paid anything to travel anywhere. He got to travel up to the mountains after I had left, but we never had a chance together. We mainly stuck to the city itself.

Here's my handsome travel companion:

And here I am taking in my daily dosage of morning coffee:

Looking at that picture right now makes me really cold, as it's currently in the 40s outside, but while we were there we enjoyed sunny, clear-blue skies with temps in the 80s. We couldn't have asked for better weather.

Trolley wires from the public transit:

Saturday morning we stopped by the city's HUGEHUGEHUGE farmer's market. Really, I was flabbergasted. It was very large, active, and really well organized. We got breakfast there in the form of a massive raspberry tart.

Later that day we wandered over to see the Mormons and enjoyed an organ recital in the Tabernacle. (We had just missed the choir by a couple days. Darn.)

We also toured a home of Brigham Young's, enjoyed the beautiful grounds, saw the city from the view of the observation deck, and met with several kind and helpful members of the LDS church.

We ate at some great restaurants, including a place called Eva's, where we dined al fresco on their crowded back patio:

Eva's is highly recommended, by the way.

The rest of our time together was spent shopping, browsing some truly awesome used book stores, marveling at how over-the-top our hotel was, and just generally forgetting our day-to-day responsibilities and enjoying time together. It was, in short, a perfect vacation.

So the moral of this story is that, should you ever have a chance to visit Salt Lake City, do it. Don't be like me and get all huffy initially and think, Salt Lake City? Why can't this conference be in like New York or something? Salt Lake City is clean, inviting, well-organized, affordable, and very friendly. Plus Stephen and I were in used book store heaven, so of course we won't say anything bad about it.

(You don't even want to know how many books we came back with. Steve almost had to pay an extra checked luggage fee for excess bag weight. Whoops.)