Picks and Pans – Between RMNP and Salt Lake City

PICKS:
Off the Beaten Path Bookstore and Coffee Shop in Steamboat Springs, CO

Another great independently owned bookshop, with possibly the best children’s book section ever….they built a book reading fort complete with doors too small for adults and pillows properly placed for getting lost in a good book. It will however be eternally linked with Michael Jackson’s death because it was there that I heard the news over the quietly playing local NPR broadcast.

Wasatch Mountain State Park in Midway, UT

We didn’t get to see much of the Oak Hollow campground because by the time we got there is was dark and dumping rain like nobody’s business, but the showers (plumbing type, not the rain) were nice (and free) and each campsite was entirely encased in trees.

Java Cow Cafe & Bakery in Park City, UT

This coffee shop was sufficient. There was coffee and wi-fi, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of place that encourages lingering. The chairs weren’t comfortable and the tables were a bit small. We were the only customers that stayed longer than 20 minutes. That said, we were never made to feel like we couldn’t stay and we did manage to spend several hours getting our internet fix.


The Eating Establishment
in Park City, UT

Unfortunately for us, we were not hungry for breakfast when we arrived at The Eating Establishment because their “Miner” plates looked like delicious variations of egg, meat, cheese and vegetable mash….which is really the best thing to eat for breakfast.Their lunches were pretty good too, but if I were to do it again I would definitely opt for breakfast.

PANS:
Dinosaur National Monument

There are two main sections in Dinosaur National Monument: the mildly sucky and the colossally sucky. The mildly sucky section (otherwise known as the “geological section of the park”) has some ok versions of the really amazing rock formations you can see in Utah. The colossally sucky section of the park (also referred to as the “dinosaur quarry”) apparently has an incredibly concentrated area of dinosaur fossils, but you can’t see it because it has been closed for the last six years (thanks to lack of federal funds to repair damaged buildings). They don’t bother to make this abundantly clear when you stop at the mildly sucky section. No, they let you drive the 30 miles to figure it out for yourself. The only part of the colossally sucky section that is open is an entirely unsatisfying hike on which you may or may not see one, that’s right one, dinosaur vertebral column. The one thing we were grateful for on our journey into the worst national monument ever is that we didn’t have a dinosaur crazed kid in the back seat wondering why his parents promised a visit to a dinosaur quarry and instead they have taken him to Suckvillle.

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