Payson, UT to Salt Lake City, UT

Today was a really good day, especially after a personally tough week.

We had a usual morning including the traditional breakfast, and headed out of the senior center/police station banquet center at around 6:30 AM, a pretty nice time for us, considering that we usually woke up an hour earlier.

My paceline for today was Tommy (U of Illinois), Alex (U of Illinois), Jason (graduate of George Mason), and Chris (Colorado). Jason was a three time Ironman, and Chris did Journey of hope a couple years ago. With that being said, we were expected to fly today as we took the lead GPS tracker, and we did not disappoint one bit. We destroyed Utah, absolutely wrecked it.

We were told it was 65 miles away from Payson. However, we had to backtrack about 15 miles to get to highway 68, so it really was an 80 mile trek.

One thing was for sure, the scenery was a lot more pleasant than Nevada. We basically road along Utah Lake, a pretty large freshwater lake. As we approached civilization, the roads started to appear nicer, traffic intensified, and there was a lot more scenery to look at.

For lodging today, we stayed at Zion’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The place was pretty nice but it didn’t feel like the stereotypical church.

For dinner, we had burgers and hotdogs at Ragin’ Waters, which was a sponsor meal from one of the local facilities that works with disabilities. This was my first time at a water park in quite some time, so it was nice to have some fun and get a little wit. Some of those rides erred on a side of danger, which amplified the thrill to some extent. We interacted with a few participants. One of the kids I met, Ethan, was a pretty big movie buff, and it sound like he literally studied IMDB.com. Tell him a C-list actor and he could tell you all the TV cameos he was in. Ethan was also a Mormon, and we had had pretty interesting conversation about his religion.

Following dinner, we came back to the Church. I really wanted to explore Salt Lake City’s downtown, but ran out of time. I was pretty surprised at how big Salt Lake City was. I always thought it was just a scenic town like South Lake Tahoe, but it has quite a large population.

We ended up getting some fourth meal at TGI Fridays. It was nice, because almost everyone came to TGI Friday’s, and it ended up being an all right time. Came back to the Church to sleep off a hard day’s work. Not the first time I fell asleep at church…