(Photos with captions coming tomorrow.....)
We spent three whole days in Salt Lake City. This wasn't by design. It was more of a necessity. The only non-stop flight to Miami didn't leave until midnight, so we actually had the entire third day to do a little more sightseeing before flying back home. To be honest, I didn't know what to expect when we first arrived. The city -- and for that matter, the state -- was founded by Mormon settlers and also serves as the headquarters for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was under the impression this would be a fairly conservative place. But the city proved to be a lot of fun, and different from what we imagined originally. I know that devout Mormons do not drink alcohol or do drugs, but in Salt Lake City you can purchase alcohol on just about every street corner (whether in a bar, restaurant or club) and medical marijuana was legal and advertised. The city has numerous comedy clubs and music venues and a great pedestrian mall called City Creek right in the middle of the downtown area next to the Temple Square. Salt Lake City has all the casual or fine dining you can possibly desire and a fascinating mix of museums, as well. And this doesn't include the array of excursions one can take outside the city to see Utah's phenomenal natural landscape. Another thing we did not expect to see was homeless people, but I guess this is becoming more prevalent in our country now. I was also a little shocked to find so many young people with tattoos and piercings, which, again, was not something I expected in a city founded by Mormons. I later read the Mormon population of the city is no longer the majority so perhaps the changes stem from the normal evolution of all modern societies. Either way, Salt Lake City proved to be a lot of fun for us. The pictures below were taken on our last two days in the city from places we visited outside of the Temple Square and Great Salt Lake area, they include pictures from our visits to the Clark Planetarium, the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and some other sites.