Ogden, Promontory Point, and more…

You know, we could do a pretty cool adventure ride without ever leaving Utah, and what’s floating around in my mind right now is a special package for a 5 or 6 day ride that goes like this…buy a new RX3, and get a free guided tour hitting the high spots in the Great State of Utah.  You’d pay for your hotels, meals, and gas, and we’ll ride with you on a free guided Utah tour as part of the deal.   Folk, Utah is that good, and I’d love to ride this state on my RX3!

About that photo you see above…Susie and I rolled into Odgen today to visit their museums, and these Ogden motor officers were parked out front.  It was a great photo op, I asked, they said okay, and the photo you see above is the result!  And yes, it was raining this morning…but that never stopped me from riding and it didn’t stop these motor officers, either!

Ogden has four museums and an art gallery in their old railroad station, and it’s one heck of a deal.  For a very minimal entrance fee, you get to see the Browning antique car collection, the Browning firearms museum, the rail road museum, the cowboy museum, and an art gallery.   Wow!

John Moses Browning, who did a lot of his work in Ogden, was perhaps the world’s most prolific arms inventor, and this museum highlights his creations as well as many other interesting guns.   I was in my element here!

There were a lot of interesting firearms on display, and then we migrated over to the car collection.  I took maybe a hundred photos.  Trust me on this…if you’re ever in Ogden, you don’t want to miss this place.

We toured the railroad museum, and then the cowboy museum, and then the art gallery. I grabbed a photo of Susie in the art gallery…

After a great lunch in downtown Ogden, we talked about where we’d go next, and Susie suggested Promontory Point.  We had learned a bit about it in the railroad museum, and we were only about 45 miles away.   It’s where the railroad construction crews completed the railroad that reached across the United States.   The stuff we learned about in our grade school history classes.   Only 45 miles away.

Hey, why not?

Folks, Promontory Point was great….and if you’re ever out this way and don’t go there, you’d be missing a grand opportunity.   Check out these photos of Jupiter and No. 119, the two locomotives that met on this exact spot on 10 May 1869!

Promontory Point is so far out in the boondocks that the place isn’t too crowded.   We were there for a couple of hours and we were about to leave when one of the Park Rangers suggested we hang around for another 15 minutes.  “We’re about to put the locomotives away for the evening, and you might want to see that.”   Whoa!

I can’t begin to tell you how cool that was…but I can show you…

More good stuff…we liked Arches National Park so much we took another quick roll through it yesterday morning.  I grabbed a few more photos just because I wanted to see what the park looked like with the sun in the east instead of the west…

From there, we rode over to Dead Horse State Park.   That was equally awesome….

On the ride in, I even spotted this guy soaking up the warmth from the road…he was non-venomous, of course, or else I would not have gotten that close!

We were on a roll.  Literally.  Canyonlands National Park was just down the road.  In for a penny, in for a pound…

Utah is truly amazing, and I had no idea these parks were here.  I might have heard of Arches; I had never heard of Dead Horse or Canyonlands.   Canyonlands is every bit the equal of the Grand Canyon, and Arches is as breathtaking as Zion.   Grand places, to be sure.

Here’s another hot tip…a couple of years ago I qualified for the National Park lifetime entrance deal.   When I say I qualified, it sounds like I won a contest or something, and in a sense, I guess I did…I turned 62.   When that happens, for $10 you can buy a lifetime pass that gets you into any National Park in the US.  It’s got to be one of the best deals ever.   I’m sure getting my $10 worth.

More good news:  I’m getting lots of emails about the Western America Adventure Ride from you…the people here in the US who want to ride with us.   That’s awesome!  We’re looking forward to seeing you.   We’ll be posting more on the blog in the near future about where we’ll be and when we’ll be there, and for those of you who don’t own an RX3 yet, we’ll be offering test rides at our evening stops.

It’s going to be grand!