January 27, 2008:

Here we are in Salt Lake City , tired after a long day, but well-fed and sleepy. We spent last night at Butte , MT , had lunch in Idaho Falls , ID – three states in one day. Weather is quite warm here, but there is some snow around making for somewhat sloppy conditions. I pity the driver, having to keep windows clear.

We hit a blizzard, too, for about a half hour, and I was glad I wasn’t driving. Great, huge, wet flakes travelling parallel to the ground and sticking to the windshield in gobs. We saw a couple of vehicles in the ditch, likely four-wheel-drives judging by the tracks in the snow as they tried to get out. Nothing serious, though. By the time we had lunch in Idaho Falls , it had cleared up.

We spent the early part of the week packing and complaining about the cold. It’s amazing how soft we get; if we had had a week of -40° weather as we sometimes do in January, last week would have seemed positively balmy.

We started our bus tour Friday morning; Lloyd came around to pick us up at six in the morning, and took us to McDonald’s on 8^th St. where our bus arrived on time. From there, we went to Regina to pick up some more passengers, then to Swift Current for lunch, and to Lethbridge for supper and the night.

There were a few people we knew on the bus, some we had met last year while touring, and some friends of long standing from Wynyard and Porcupine Plain. Doreen says I shouldn’t mention any names, as people may not want to announce to the world that they are away from home for an extended period.

When we got to Lethbridge , we had a social get-together with the people from the other bus, and I believe we knew almost half of them. There were over twenty got on at Tisdale, most of them people we knew from last year’s tour. It felt like old home week!

We spent the second night in Butte , Montana . We got in there fairly early so had lots of time for visiting and mingling in the evening. These tours are pretty gentle. We get our wake-up call at 6:30 most mornings, and the bus leaves at 8, giving us time for a leisurely breakfast. We stop somewhere about mid-morning for coffee; that is usually a half-hour stop. Then lunch time around noon, another coffee break in mid-afternoon, and stop for supper between 5 and 6. Today was a longer day than usual, because we stopped at Mormon Square for a tour before going to our hotel. That took about forty five minutes. We didn’t take that tour; we had done it last year and had no interest in repeating it. There were several of us that stayed on the bus, visited, and watched the trolleys go by.