Day Two: Salt Lake City, UT-Junesberg, CO

June 14th, 2009
Miles: 580.2 miles 8 hours
Music: The Format, Tegan and Sara, Green Day, Sufjan Stevens

Left again around 1 and drove all day. Corin gave us cherries from her sweet Utah backyard. Good day. High spirits. Katy and Katie slept for a bit and I listened to Conor Oberst and grooved hard on it. Had some good talks about life and love when they woke up. Decided to try to find a hotel because we got no emails from couchsurfers.

Family friends in Utah!

We made the decision to stay in Colorado mostly to be able to say that we did. Arrived in Junesberg, CO around 9pm, Found an awesome country road to cross the border on and took some amazing photos and videos of the heat lightning that is up in the sky (doesn’t hit the ground or make thunder)

We Came to the sketchiest motel and no one answered. We were too reminded of the Texas chainsaw massacre and kept going. OK we found the second most sketchy hotel in the country. This cute mother and her 11-month-old son Wesley, who had a sweet ass dinosaur shirt, ran it. We hung out, no big deal. After arriving at our fabulous apartment style room, we decided to go to a bar. The bar was right across the street! Super sketchy but we wanted to learn about the place. We talked with the bartender Heidi and it was obvious that she had lived here her whole life and doesn’t see outta-towners like us. We were definitely the highlight of their week (as pretentious as that sounds, it was true) we told Heidi all about our trip over a pitcher of Coors which costs 7 dollars. Other locals came over interested in us and our story. One man in a sweet tie-dye shirt asked me what that lighted up box was around me neck. (I explained to him that it was a digital camera) He was pretty impressed to say the least. Then he asked if we had any magic mushrooms. Heidi told us that in their town of 1000 people, there were 14 churches. Welcome to Mormon Town baby.

Shortly after, a man named Drew challenged us to a game of foosball. Katy joined his team and Katie and I teamed up, despite my lack of any athletic ability aside from running (yes even at sports like foosball)

The first game was to be expected. Katy and Drew kicked our ass. Drew told us that all he does is play foosball all the time so it was to be expected. After some serious coaching from the soccer-player-in-real-life Katie, we stepped up our game and came out victorious. Drew said it was his first defeat in months… Finished our beer and now we’re off to bed after some retro-60’s-era photography of our sweet place. Waking up very early tomorrow.

PS Katie just came out to turn the lights off and I told her goodnight and that I’d just sleep on the couch. She looked at me and said, “I hope you don’t get crabs.” …. I said, “Thanks”.
Love,
Luke

So I had my first leg of driving today, heading out from Salt Lake. I cannot believe how many churches there were, seriously. I looked out the window to my right, and then saw another one to my left with another one 200 yards away from it. Talked to my sister Kelsey on the phone and told me to visit the town in Utah that actually advertises that they aren’t Mormon, but I wanted to get the crap out of there. I’m pretty sure I scared the begeebers out of Katy and Luke when I first started driving, it was so curvy! Plus a crazy thunder/lightning/hail storm decided to come down. We thought it was God punishing all the Mormon’s for not being in church on a Sunday. Or punishing us for making fun of Mormons.



After my leg, I took the beefiest nap and it was amazing. We were making good time, so we thought we’d stop early for the night and get an early start in the morning. Luke freaked us out when he hit a hug “red-neck” pothole. Katy had a bag of Oyster Crackers open and they went everywhere in the back seat. It was like half the bag. Pretty sure we picked the sketchiest place to stay, Junesburg, Colorodo. Seriously, I think that three families just moved there and decided to populate the area themselves. We took a picture by the “Welcome to Colorado!” sign and Katy totally stepped in a huge puddle. What a pathetic loser! (I only say that because for a good chunk of our travel today we did quoted Dumb and Dumber. It was awesome).

We found a hotel, and not wanting to pay for three people, I hid in the car while Luke and Katy booked a room. I was so scared the lady would see me through the window, but I hid under a pillow pretty good. We finally got it, and they told me to grab my bag when all of a sudden the lady we booked the room from came out of her apartment. I totally did some sort of Jujitsu move back into the car to try and get out of sight….I’m pretty sure she saw me, whatevs. Anyway, we get to our sweet 70’s style room and decided to go to the bar across the street where there were some locals. They were definitely interesting, one older gentlemen tried to unhook by bra. I didn’t mind. One lady kept harassing Katy asking her if she ever lived in Idaho, Montana, or Washington. We figured it was time to go when they kept talking about this large room next to the bar area, saying that “we should check it out” and that “they put you in there if you misbehave”. We were pretty sure we would have become sex-slaves if we decided to check it out. Luke thinks they were going to make us into skin-lampshades. I don’t know, I think that would be a really big waste of skin if you ask me. -KTK