From the beauty and vastness of southern Utah’s National Parks, we headed north to the relative normality of Salt Lake City, slightly sceptical as to just how entertaining a city synonymous with Utah’s Mormon-influenced perceived mundane reputation might prove. Rough Guide’s description of the place as a city which the majority of folk in the US regard as being ‘decidedly short on spontaneous public fun’ hardly helped our apprehension…
It was a relatively sizeable drive from Moab to Salt Lake, with relatively little to break the journey other than when Ads attempted a U-turn at the best part of thirty miles-an-hour. Regardless, one instantly noticeable feature of Salt Lake City (SLC) is how clean their streets were. Furthermore, the whole place was rather well organised – they even had roundabouts (or ‘turning-circles’ as our stars-and-stripes wearing amigos like to refer to them as). We hadn’t seen a roundabout in months!…
We’d booked ourselves a cabin-type site in SLC, and it was literally a garden shed with a couple of beds in. Nothing more. No thrills exemplified. A shave and shower later we headed into town for a few (more) beverages and to sample the local nightlife. Winty – perfection personified as far as driving went thus far this trip – opted to exit a petrol station across three lanes of traffic and, unknowingly, a significantly-kerbed central divide. Cue head-scratching as we tried to work out what the massive bump and jolt had been. Cue laughter when we realised. Smoothly played, sir.
In town we hit up a place called The Hotel which was a good laugh. It had an incredibly diverse crowd; in fact, the only thing more diverse was the dress code – or lack of – which saw folk in everything from shirts and shoes, and heels and dresses, to flips flops, baggy shorts and ‘funky’ (term used lightly) caps. We were also amused by the presence of bright orange ‘crossing flags’ at each set of lights, there to make you more visible to any approaching traffic…
The following day we re-lived our more youthful days, venturing to the Raging Waters water park. T’was a most amusing afternoon. The girl on the gate was near-stupefied by our English accents, stumbling over her words before eventually requesting a conversation with us (“wait… there… talk to me”), and then genuinely thanking us for speaking with her for a minute or so. The park itself was good fun – wave machines, small slides, big slides, weird slides, tube rides etc., the most impressive of which was the Acapulco slide, a seventy-five foot slide with a rise in the middle that sees you fall at up to fifty feet a second. Goooood fun…
Well, for most, that is. The day’s next highlight came when Ads managed to get stuck in the dip of this giant slide (having not somehow not built up enough speed on the downward section before the mini rise that defeated him), causing that slide to be closed for ten minutes whilst he was removed/rescued. Ads returned to us somewhat sheepishly. Myself and Winty laughed a lot…
Post-pool fun and games we dined at an In’N’Out Burger – great American fast food… kind of like a McDonalds for people with taste buds. They also kindly offer chilli-sweets with each meal. We partook in our own chilli-challenge. It was a rather unpleasant experience. Those with facebook can even see the video of our endeavours via this link (please excuse any expletives)…
The following morning was lazy. Although, we did wash some clothes for the first time in aaages… an undoubted bonus. In SLC, Ads and I got haircuts. Afterwards, we entered a Target (think Tesco but really crap) to try and find Winty, and ended up leaving with a straw Stetson and a $30 fedora. As you do. We also visited a state liquor store – one of the few places in Utah you can buy proper drinks (i.e. not the 2% Budweiser (and equivalents) you get in the bars and supermarkets elsewhere).
Then it was off to meet the Petersons, a family Winty had stayed with whilst soccer coaching in America a few summers ago. We met the family (Tyler, Lisa, Malone, Harrison, and Boston) at their (very nice) house, 
itself in a rather nice neighbourhood, before they very generously took us out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant that served THE best Kobe beef we had ever tasted in our lives. Seriously, it was so tender, juicy, and flavoursome that it bordered on the ridiculous. I can now comprehend why, a few years back, M&S charged nearly £80 for a sandwich that contained this type of beef 
(the cows get massages whilst alive!) and a few other suitably ostentatious ingredients.
Another fine trait of this place was that you were given your own chef who cooked all of the food as you requested right in front of you, which – flames to the ceiling and all – made for a rather spectacular experience. He even had the skill / audacity [can’t decide which is more apt] to bounce the as yet un-cracked eggs up and down on his food-flipper [or whatever it’s called…] several times before expertly cracking the egg on the side of his said kitchen implement. Seriously impressive skills. And the best bit… they’re opening a branch in London!…
Back at chez Peterson we chilled out in the leather recliners with a few Buds and a game or two of Fifa08 in their cinema room (England beat the USA in this one at least…) before being shredded, annihilated, and generally obliterated by the youthful Malone at Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The final scores sum up his superiority nicely: Malone 5,500pts / myself 850pts / Ads 300pts. Tyler even outscored me despite only playing the final five minutes (out of twenty).
After a fine nights sleep and excellent hospitality from the Peterson family, we bade farewell and headed across town to visit Kathy, Mike, Millie and Liam, who Winty had also stayed with whilst soccer coaching. We had a lovely chat for a couple of hours before Mike had an asthma attack and was rushed off to hospital. It’s a credit to the American way of doing things that ‘first responders’ were there within a minute or two of the phone call, and that he was able to return home within a few days.
Following the dramas of the morning we visited Park City, which hosts the Sundance Film Festival each year, and had a wander around the delightfully rustic (many wooden-fronted shops, big café culture, etc) and altogether rather attractive town. The town also had several markers, signposts, and information boards relating to the Winter Olympics that Salt Lake City hosted back in 2002.
So, naturally, we made our way past the once-Athlete’s Village to the main Olympic Park and its visitor centre and exhibits. We toured around the site, perusing various locations such as the bobsled track (spectators get that close to the action that they could pretty much reach out and touch the passing athletes), and the insanely vast and ridiculously steep ski-jump, before pausing to watch several future international athletes practicing freestyle jump tricks into an air-filled swimming pool (check the video below out). It was all rather cool really.
[I've included several photos below from around the park (and one from in the museum, you guess which), and hopefully if you click here you should get a link to a long video of some freestyle practice jumps I posted on youtube with some delightful in-depth commentary from Winty...)].
The chap on the front desk also informed us that for “just” $60 we could “do” the Olympic bobsled track (they call the sled the ‘Comet’). We were intrigued. Very intrigued. But at nearly 5pm we had left it too late in the day sadly. Not to worry though, we planned on returning the following day…
That night we aimed for some more roadside roulette, but a lack of suitable locations and superfluity of state law enforcers in potentially apt places eventually enforced a 2am check-in at a rather ghastly motel, complete with hookers in the lobby, one of whom was tattooed from head-to-toe, resembling a wall of graffiti. Regardless, the following morning’s complimentary coffee rather made up for the other deficiencies.
Indeed, that morning saw us head to a bar called Green Street to watch the England-Slovenia (and USA-Algeria) group decider. The place was absolutely rammed with American fans, kindly booing us on entry, but the bar staff took pity and got two of the twenty televisions switched from the US game to the English one. We were even interviewed by a girl from the Salt Lake City Tribune for an English perspective on the progress of American ‘soccer’ over the previous few years – read the published article (with our expert opinions included) via this link!
The atmosphere built nicely. There were an abundance of American flags and various American sporting shirts on show. Several pro-US chants (and a couple of anti-English ones) were belted out with gusto, interspersed by a few folk offering the dulcet tones of their vuvuzelas. Defoe scored for England. We cheered. The Americans booed. The games teetered along precariously – England leading and about to progress; America drawing, about to exit the World Cup. And then, a fine moment: our final whistle (meaning progression from the group stages) coming at exactly the same time as the Americans finally scored a (winning) goal. We cheered. They cheered. We all cheered. Some American chap bought us a load of double whiskey shots in mutual celebration. It was 10am after all. Even a German chap congratulated us.
In a fine mood from the morning’s enjoyable football supporting, the subsequent drinking and resulting early-afternoon’s sobering-up, we headed back to the Olympic Park for some bobsled madness. $60 was steep, very steep, but how many times do you get to do an Olympic bobsled track? We were driven down by a chap who was the US national team’s #5 for several years, hitting 70mph, pulling 4G on the way, and clocking a time of 1:03:05 [a dollar per second!], which we were told was rather rapid for only three people in the sled (Winty’s shoulder sadly prevented him doing it).
It was a crazy experience, kind of like an absurdly exciting rollercoaster but yet way more intense – after all, it was just one chap we’d never met before steering us down. The compression felt in the belly of some of the more aggressive corners I find impossible to describe, but if you check out the video embedded above (which someone else took) you can see what we went through. The adrenalin was pumping, quite a rush! My three predominant memories are that firstly, we were going bloody fast; secondly, that we were also pretty much sideways in several corners; and finally, that it was almost impossible to lift your head enough to look upwards. A crazy, crazy experience…
And that was pretty much it for our Salt Lake City sojourn. A city that had a reputation of offering so little, ended up delivering so much. Funky nights out, water parks, chilli challenges, ridiculously tasty Kobe beef, a couple of genuinely lovely families, a cracking atmosphere for a football (‘soccer’) game, the Olympic Park, and an utterly unforgettable and absurdly mind-blowing Olympic bobsled run. Not too bad for a city most Americans still view as being ‘decidedly short on spontaneous public fun’…
