Writing this 2 weeks out of time so sorry it it’s brief and to the point. We’ve had 2 weeks of very limited Wi-Fi. The kind where you can log on excitedly for 5 minutes send a couple of quick emails, have a quick scout around Facebook then disconnected again. So apologies if you have been sat by your computer waiting with bated breath for our next posting – probably just our mums then!!

So back to Tuesday 30^th September. We left Rawlins, Wyoming where we’d been over night and headed west and got to Salt Lake City, Utah just after lunch. A spot of shopping then checked into a campsite on the outskirts of town just after lunch. We took the TRAX railway system into town. Hoped, even though we were planning on spending just the one evening in town, to get a small taster of what the town was about.

I don’t know that we got that. But we did see a very beautiful, very clean, very organised city. Temple Square and the surrounding eating and shopping districts were lovely. We had a very odd experience at the Family Genealogy centre where having been lured in from the street side we were then basically shown a video, then taken to the UK section to be shown by the power of the WWW that there is a centre in Aldershot were we can trace our family history!! Bit disappointing!! Charlie particularly was furious with what a waste of time this was and how we could very easily have done that ourselves!!  Anyway, we had a nice evening wandering around, nice to be amongst civilization and not in a pine forest campsite!! Lovely burgers at Johnny Rockets too!!

The next day we took the kids for a hair cut at the onsite Barbers. A totally charming lady cut the boys hair and talked to us a lot about the city which she described as “very controlled” by the Latter Day Saints in a way that occasionally back fires (i.e. making the beer only 3% in bars which leads to people drinking hard spirits instead) but for the main part is a great thing.

So on Wednesday 1^st October we headed out of Salt Lake City towards the west across what John was most excited about – the Bonneville Salt Flats. So out of the city and pas the Great Salt Lake and it’s evaporated basin, along 40 miles of a long straight road with salt flats on either side we got to the vast salt flats of Bonneville which cover 150 square miles and apparently are so flat you can see the curvature of the earth – not sure about that honestly!!

We got there hoping that we would be able to actually drive over the slat flats as 1000’s do each and every year having travelled here to drive where the land speed records have been made and broken for so many years. However it was flooded when we got there so we had to contend ourselves with taking endless photos of Frankie on the salt flats!!

After that we headed west and entered a new state – Nevada at West Wendover. Excited to see Wendover Will the enormous cowboy who welcomes you to Nevada!!

We were now headed as quickly and directly as possible to the West coast and the Oregon coast, which we were promised, would be a sight worth seeing!! This meant heading north to get onto the highway. So we zipped through Nevada (for now) and the last town we passed was Jackpot. Appropriately named, as it was basically a town full of casinos. Apparently it sprung up here on the border when Idaho banned slot machines in 1956!!

We stopped over night in Twin Falls in Idaho on Wednesday 1^st October. It was named for a pair of 200-foot cascades in Snake River. A small town that is famous for the fact that Evil Knieval had a failed attempt at using a stunt rocket powered motorcycle to clear the canyon.  He wanted to jump the Grand Canyon but the government said no so he leased the land here in Twin Falls so no one could stop him trying his crazy stunt over the 500’ deep gorge. If he had any sense he would have changed his mind – which is what is suspected actually happened.

All we did here was give the boys 2 hours at the skate park while we cooked dinner in the car park. Funny how we seem to be spending alot of our time in carparks while they quickly involve themselves in the skating community of whatever town we happen to be in. I am so proud of them for bravely putting on their kit and wandering out onto the ‘half pipes’ even though they are still very much beginners!! I know I wouldn’t have the confidence to do it. We obviously try to encourage them by standing at the sides and cheering them on – causing nothing but embarrassment and waving gestures for us to ‘disappear’!!

Thursday 2nd, we woke up and realised we had in fact stayed in ‘Happy Valley’ – what a great place to live!!

Certainly seemed a Happy Town – had a chip in our windscreen fixed by a charming man called John who refused to let us pay him and spent the whole time he was doing the best repair job we have ever seen chatting to us about the city and his enjoyable life here!! Seemed to be the same all over town and when we stopped at the canyon to see where ole Evil Kneival had attempted to jump the man in the information centre spent ages to charting to us. Seems the crowd of base jumpers doing their thing here on the bridge weren’t so much following in the footsteps of old Kneival but taking advantage of the fact that this is the only bridge in the whole of the US of A where you can jump without notifying the proper authorities. We managed to resist the temptation to hurl ourselves off anything and left pretty darn quickly.

We had a huge huge huge driving day across the last bit of the Oregon Trail. We drove about 500 miles and stopped at 10pm in Portland, Oregon with kids and I by then in our pyjamas in the back!! We had changed time zone twice in the last 12 hours and passed through 3 States.!! But most pleasing of all we descended finally to 1200’, which felt lovely!!

Friday 3^rd October and we woke in Portland. Had a lovely breakfast in a red London double decker bus (outside an adult store!!) and headed along the border with Washington State and onto the coast.

Hoorah – the Oregon coast at last!! Had we driven here in a straight line from when we arrived in the US we would have been here on Day 2. Our zigging and zagging has taken us a long way ‘off course’ but through some very fun and adventurous times!!