Any recommendations for Salt Lake City?

[thewayne]

Russet and I will be there for part of Wednesday and Thursday next week and I'm looking for good restaurants and such. Also any good used CD or book stores.

I think we'll be near the university center, but we're driving, so moving about isn't an issue.

Thanks!

Comments

[acelightning73]

When my son's trailer broke down coming over the mountains into Salt Lake City, we had to stay there for a couple of days until it could be fixed. The two things I remember are the IMAX movie in the PLanetarium, and the Brazilian rodizio restaurant in a shopping mall.

[thewayne]

Oh, Brazilian steakhouses are so yummy!  It's been absolute ages since I've been to an Imax, and we have one in Alamogordo at the Space Museum!  Never been here, been living here or coming up for almost 20 years, too.

[acelightning73]

The IMAX movie was Tom Cruise aboard the ISS. They were frisbeeing a flour tortilla around the cabin, taking a bite as it flew past. And they wore shorts and tank tops, and socks, to work in.

And here in New Jersey, there are a number of brazilian barbecue places. Apparently a lot of Portuguse and Spanish sailors settled around the shores of Raritan Bay, which makes up the lower part of New York Harbor. There are two of them within a few miles of me,although I haven't been to them. But it's great fun. My son and his wife were in one, and my d-i-l took the wooden block and turned it so the red side was up -"stop bringing us meat for a little while". And the buffet with the sides was fun - french fries, beans and rice,and I think some sort of Brazilian coleslaw. And I had my favorite alcholic drink - a caipirinha, which is made from cachaca, a form of distilled sugar-cane spirit, vaguely like rum, muddle half a lime with some sugar and serve very cold. I gave a sip to a friend of mine who was at the restaurant with me, and her comment was, "Rocket fuel". And the one thing I kept asking them to bring more of was turkey breast medallions, wrapped in bacon and barbecued. And my son liked the alligator sausage.

[thewayne]

Two friends of mine whom I see pretty much every time I go to Phoenix, they got a gift card for a Brazilian steakhouse and invited me to join them.  I had a very nice small salad before we got into the meat run.  I recall the meat I liked the most was a parm cheese-crusted pork.  Just amazing!

[disneydream06]

No clue here.
I've never been to Utah.
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

We went there when I was a teen, probably around '78.  I still have some of the 35mm slides that I took at the Salt Lake and the Mormon Temple Visitor's Center.

[disneydream06]

Cool. :)

I have my dad's old slides. from way back when.
I should get them out and look at them some time. :)

[acelightning73]

I stayed as far aways as I could from the Temple. I had expected Salt Lake City to be a grim theocracy, but it wasn't that bad. And after three days we were able to get back on I-80 and resume our trek to San Jose (where my son was going to grad school at Stanford). To do so, we had to come over the Donner Pass. I got very dizzy walking from the car to the building with the rest rooms at the top of the pass. I don't do too well at eight thousand feet altitude.

[thewayne]

We live at 9,000', the observatory my wife works at is 9,200'.  Several years ago my parents came to town and I was going to drive them around the very rural Texas where my mom grew up.  I told them they had to stay in Alamogordo, about 4,500', and we'd meet them there for dinner and I'd pick them up for the tour.  I just didn't want them having problem up here.  Russet did the same when her parents came to town for their last trip.

[acelightning73]

Most of my ancestors lived near seacoasts.Sea-level pressure is what I need. Once we got down to the level of the Pacific, I was fine. (And then our son took us to a beach/amusement park , and I hiked all the way down to the tide line to dip my feet in the Pacific, because I hadn't done so in Australia. My ancestors mostly came from the British Isles, the ones who got across the ocean stayed in New England, and I grew up within sight of the skyline of Manhattan. The mountains we had to go over to get to the beach were where the Heinleins had a house designed by Virginia, but we didn't go anywhere near it. (As we drove up, the afternoon fog bank or cloud layer began to spill over the top of the ridge, making a very interesting scenic effect.)

[thewayne]

I remember when I was at the Grand Canyon about 20 years ago.  I think it was mid/late afternoon, sun was still well-up.  And a cloud in the canyon hit the wall, and began spilling over the rim, making for a ground fog.  It was a very cool effect! For the most part, we don't have much in the way of sharp mountain ridges up here, so something like what you saw doesn't happen much here.  Sunday, my wife and I went out, and on returning the entire eastern sky looked like looming rain clouds.  But that was on the eastern side of the ridge, and there was no telling if they'd get enough pressure to cross the ridge and rain on us.  Hasn't happened yet.  My wife thought it might be an early monsoon pattern, she's fairly good at judging weather - something that comes with being an astronomer.

[acelightning73]

That's the only place I've ever seen fog/cloud coming over a sharp ridgeline like that. Around here, fog is, you wake up in the morning and the radio traffic report tells you of major jams on your way to work because it's so foggy that people are getting into accidents.

I'm a bit of a weather geek myself - weather is a branch of science a young child can learn about - and also an aviation geek and an astronomy geek (astronomy or meteorology are the two most frequent "first sciences" for obnoxiously bright kids. We have an annoying tendency to look up at the sky a lot.) I can smell when it's going to snow soon, and it smells different from rain.

[thewayne]

I haven't noticed imminent snow smelling different, if I remember I'll try to pay attention to that this winter.  I can usually tell by the look of the clouds.  At least here - no idea if snow clouds look different from a lower altitude.  We have a lookout point that lets you see to White Sands and the Organ Mountains, a good 70 miles or so.  And I have photos of a cloud layer filling that valley starting just below Cloudcroft.  It's always interesting driving down in weather like that.  When I get my photography web site back up, I'll try and remember to send you a link to that one photo in particular - my hosting service changed the IP addresses on some of my sites and didn't tell me in advance!  Now I have to update info on my domain registration site, and just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

[acelightning73]

I don't know how to describe it. When the air is damp and getting ready to rain on us, it just smells wet. The smell of approaching snow has a bit of a musky or pungent undertone to it. Almost like how very cold air tricks your nose into thinking you're smelling menthol or mint.