Today we drove Boulder City, NV to Spanish Fork, Utah. Spanish Fork is nine miles south of Provo, proper, and is part of the Provo-Orem megalopolis. We spent the day on I15, which is a good road. It's cooler here, when we arrived it was in the 90's and it felt cool to us.
First there was Las Vegas to transit. Henderson, a bedroom community to Las Vegas, is growing exponentially. So is the number of distribution centers. It's amazing to me how many new houses we saw. Here is a not great photo of coming in to the city, the windshield is covered in dead bugs. I was trying to portray the vastness of the sprawl out from the strip, but it's too poor of a photo.
We were going to stop at the Beaver, UT Subway, but it was packed. So, we went to the Port of Subs in Fillmore, which was not great. The phone did not mention that there was another Subway at exit 188 in Nephi, which would have been geographically good. If we drive this route again, please make a note of this Subway.
We went through the Virgin River Gorge. It's a beautiful, but bugs on the wind shield and harsh sunlight conspired against my photography.
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Further up the road, there was some red rock showing.
But after awhile, there was a lot of not too much to look at.
Driving into Spanish Fork from the south was shocking. The amount of new housing devouring agricultural land is shocking. Entire neighborhoods of identical ugly houses have been built. Spanish Fork itself seems to be a center for retail. There's not much else other than Big 5, Joanne Fabrics, Walmart, Costco and etc. The west has become all retail all the time.
We're at the Provo-Spanish Fork Hampton Inn and Suites. It's a nice hotel, it's new, like much of Spanish Fork. The bathroom has multiple levels of horizontal surface, which makes putting out all of our stuff easier. The air conditioner does have a thermostat and is quiet.
This is the view from the room. We're facing away from the freeway, which is very good.
Tomorrow is the really long day, hotel to hotel is 468 miles. That's far. We need to rethink the lengths of our drive segments. Of course, there is often nothing where a person would like to stop.
I recall flying into Vegas and getting a photo from the plane of the strip. It is certainly distinctive.
ReplyDeleteYou can see the bugs on the windshield in your photos - I don't see very many at all. Hope there is something interesting on your drive today.
All I could think was, how much water does all that take?
ReplyDeleteThirty years ago when I drove the country to be at shows I became appalled at every freeway exit in the country having a McDonalds, and then a Fridays and an Applebee's; then the Walgreen invasion and just the growth of homogeneity. But I still could drive those beautiful roads and gape at the scenery.
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