Sunday, May 16, 2010

The Wasatch Back Loves ME Back!!!


Darwin and I took a little jaunt northward this past weekend. He had a conference in Logan, so I tagged along, even though I am still a cripple with pins sticking out of my reconstructed, robot foot. I rode in the back seat with my foot propped on pillows. Darwin looked like the royal chauffeur while I was content just being a royal pain!

I have a crush on the Wasatch back country. Kendall ran the Wasatch Back last year. They started in Logan...and ended up in Heber City. We drove up to cheer him on, and that was the first time I had ever seen parts of this great state I grew up in.

I particularly loved driving up the face of a mountain on the north side of Ogden. (This is NOT the normal Ogden Canyon road.) We wandered onto this road quite by mistake...a fortuitous mistake.



It was a steep two-laner that whipped us up over the mountain and down the back side, right into gorgeous rural farm land. Everything was so GREEN. The little towns were called Liberty, Eden, and Huntsville.


Can you see the road we came down into the valley on? It's clinging to the side of the mountain, and it's steeper than it looks!

DarDar and I decided that we needed to move there. Huntsville was our town of choice. It was such an old-fashioned country town...no fancy amenities like curb and gutter. Just grass growing over to the edges of the streets. Oh. And a beautiful lake in the back yard!


This particular home is typical of the graceful, classic homes in town. This home is where the prophet of my childhood grew up...David O. McKay.


Check out the crazy gingerbread trim on this new home overlooking Pineview Reservoir.


This is the view looking the opposite direction of the Hansel and Gretel house. I could handle this. The Huntsville pics were taken LAST summer in June, when we wandered about while Kendall was running. If you look across the lake, you can see some condos. Little did we know that we would be staying in one of them THIS year...last Friday night, in fact.

See? The Wasatch Back got me BACK. Get it????


We had NOT made reservations. This is our version of living on the edge. As the afternoon waxed old, we could not face the thoughts of descending once more into Wal Mart-and-McDonald's land. By the way, there were NO fast-food franchises in this area. They must have covenants about that sort of riff-raff. Just charming Mom and Pop businesses. We didn't want to go back into Odgen to spend the night, so we drove into the office at the condo complex to see if they had rooms to rent for just one night. They did.



This was the view from the bedroom window. Pathetic, huh!




I propped my sick and afflicted foot up on the window sill, the better to text pictures to my kids to make them jealous.


Do you see what I mean about the Wasatch Back? It really does want me to come back often. I may have to buy that faux gingerbread house in Huntsville.