Bergjord Boarding

July 29 – August 7 2016

By: Luke

Today Sam and I had almost 600 miles between us and our royal lodging for the night. This meant rolling down Mt. Rose and driving on interstate 80 for over 8 hours. This will be our first real bed in a week and we were eager to eat up those miles.

I remember very little of this drive. Not even a memorable gas station stop and I love a good gas station stop. A couple of things of note did happen. I am realizing now that we drove the entire width of the Great Basic. We also had car troubles somewhere in the middle of Nevada. We got a temperature warning and after panic googling just pulled over and let the car cool down and it seemingly healed itself.

The last memorable thing was happening upon the Utah salt flats. Almost as soon as you cross the border into Utah you crest a hill and look over a very alien landscape. Even more than The Craters of the Moon we thought we were out of this world.

There was a pull off rest area here you can walk out on to this crusty baren wasteland. We stopped and changed into some clothes that didn’t look and smell like a road trip. Partially for a nicer photo at this unplanned point of interest, but because we were supposed to be royalty tonight. It would not be acceptable to show up to our castle in basketball shorts.

We made it to Salt Lake City! Our “campsite” for the night was the Castle Creek Inn. Samie found this hotel in her research and we decided it was too good to pass up. We also figured we would deserve a bed by day 7. First impressions were immaculate. Sure it has a castle facade and a good landscaper, but the effort goes beyond what you get from a picture. Every staff member was kind and made sure we felt like royalty. Every room has a different theme and ours was “Rapunzel’s Tower”.

After checking in we headed out to seek another new experience. We hit up Chick-fil-A in a major way. Naturally my eyes were bigger than my stomach and we carried two bags of chicken goodness up to our tower. Samie spent the majority of the night in the jacuzzi and I watched HGTV while munching on chicken nuggets. Royalty is wasted on us but we had a dang good time.