DAY TWENTY FIVE

SALT LAKE CITY, UT - MOAB, UT

274.1 Miles

I'll start with an update on our car. We had to drop it off at the Acura dealer in Salt Lake City this morning around 9:30am, so they could run a full diagnostic test to figure out what was wrong. Luckily for us, they offered us to drive around an 2013 Acura TL all day... a car that costs more than 6 times the price of what we paid for our car! 

I stocked up on cookies and tea at the dealership, and we headed out for the day. The dealer called us back around 1pm to tell us what the diagnosis was. Apparently we needed a new Rocker Arm (yes that's a real car part) to help our car use it's full power when accelerating... or something like that. That cost about $200, which was much better than we feared. We also asked them to check out our car alarm, which goes off whenever it wants to, like at 3am outside of our motel door.... Unfortunately, that would also cost $200 to fix. So we got set back about $400... which hurts a little but is not the end of the world. I guess we'll have to cut back on the four star hotels for the rest of the trip!

While we were out, we drove to the city center of Salt Lake, saw the State Capitol, and parked around the Temple Square. 

We walked to Temple Square, which is really beautiful! The LDS Temple is pretty awe inspiring, and the gardens are really nice. We went in the visitors center, which is more like a mini museum, and learned all about Mormons settling the Salt Lake City area, and what the religion is up to these days. There were very friendly missionaries every where we went to answer questions, and it was really interesting to gain some new knowledge! We went to eat at Penny Ann's cafe, which was delicious, I got pasta and Kenny had some banana cream pie.

We drove out to the Great Salt Lake, which we were surprised is not more of a tourist attraction, but once we got there we understood why. 

It smells really, really bad. It was beautiful, but smelled so bad. While we were there, we got a call that the car was completed, so we headed back to the dealership!

It was all good, so we decided to head down to Moab like we had originally planned. We really wanted to see Arches National Park, so it was a race against time to get there before the sun set. The drive down was incredible, with so many mountains and valleys.

 The soil started turning red, and offered a view we hadn't really seen yet. We finally got to Arches as the sun was setting, and it was perfectly illuminated for about a half an hour. It was incredible to see these red mountains and arches highlighted by the dusk.

Purple Mountains in the sunset

 We were trying to get to the Delicate Arch before it was dark, and were a little surprised by how small it really is. 

The delicate arch is so small

The hike we went on only really offered a view from afar, but it really wasn't what we were expecting! It started getting dark and scary in the park so we hiked back down, and checked into a motel in Moab!