Day 20, Wednesday, July 6

Today I drove from the Coulter Bay campground in the Tetons to Salt Lake City. The ride through much of Wyoming was utterly monotonous. Also, somebody needs to inform the WY board of transportation that when you’re going to repave a highway, it’s possible to do it one side at a time. I say this because in several places, traffic stopped for a half hour because the road crews had (1) decided to dig a culvert ditch across both lanes of the highway, (2) & (3) decided to rip up a couple of miles of highway for repaving. In both sections of highway they'd ripped up, they made absolutely no effort to keep in mind the concerns of motorcyclists. The pilot car lead the traffic across multiple sets of criss crossed diagonal ruts in loose gravel, over sloped loose gravel sections, and diagonally across multiple level changes in the road. I thought I was going to go down several times but each time the bike slid around a bit (front and rear tires sliding in unison is just about enough to make a guy wet himself) and straightened out. Each time I got back to paved highway I found myself desperately wanting a place to pull over and sooth my nerves but both times the shoulder was all torn up, steeply sloped, and covered with loose gravel.
I pulled into the KOA at Salt Lake City around 4pm and had plenty of day light hours to set up the tent and make dinner. My neighbors Burt and Jane Yin are from the San Fran area and they offered me lodging when I was passing through. You meet the nicest people when you’re camping. They, as well as several other groups in the campground, are in town attending a barber shop singing convention. Burt tells me there are groups from all over the world an that many of them aren’t quartets but in fact have as many as 20 or 30 people.