Good evening gents. I just got home from a week long hiatus. I was visiting my wife in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is on assignment for her employer till August's end wanted me and our child to come visit. I should say I am quite glad we did. I thought it might be an interesting idea to make a few posts outlining some of the places we visited. If this is of interest then by all means I will attend to it. If no one is really interested, well, this will be a short thread!
Day 1. 19, July. We departed Kansas City International about 6:15AM CDT. Now as I mentioned in a thread in the barber shop, this was my first air flight. I suppose it is a bit of a joke to make fifty years without having done so before but the need or opportunity never arose. To say it was a bit of a knuckle whitener upon takeoff is...accurate. The pilot had a very full, heavily loaded 737 to get in the air and the engines were roaring full blast. I have to admit I was a bit light in the stomach at the acceleration and liftoff. The 737 we flew in had the lcd screens in the seat backs so you could monitor the flight progress in live time or rent a movie. Since it is only a two hour flight we just read books on the Kindle Fire and watched the progress map. It took me awhile to shake off the jitters of being four and a half miles in the air with no escape if something went awry. A pinch over two hours later we landed in Salt Lake City and the other passengers noted they thought it was a smoother than normal descent and landing. The chap I sat next to told me he makes the flight almost weekly and the updrafts at SLC international usually make for some bumpy landings. I took his word for it and thanked the Lord it was relatively smooth. Okay, laugh out loud now at the greenhorn flier.
After we found our checked baggage we made our way to the Trax station at the airport. This is a very nice electrified train system that runs North to South and East to West through Salt Lake and some of the surrounding suburbs. If I am correct I believe the line to the airport just opened this spring. It was a paltry $2.50 per ticket to ride nearly fifteen miles from SLC Int. to end of line at Sandy which was only a half mile from our hotel. The hotel staff picked us up gratis and brought us to the front door. Nice service. If you visit SLC do check out the Trax system. It is powered like the old street cars here in K.C. years ago. Overhead lines with a boom that reaches up to them to make contact. Very smooth, very quiet ride. The lines are named by colour. Red, Blue, and Green. There is also a line called Frontrunner that runs from well north of SLC South to Provo. You can transfer between lines at at least two different stations and the coloured lines connect at a number of different stations in Salt Lake City. So you can get from airport to downtown or south or even Eastward with only a train hop or two. And pricing is superb. As I said, one way is $2.50. Round trip is $5.00. All day pass is $6.25. And the nicest part is there is a free ride zone in the heart of the city that makes shopping and moving around a breeze. And the price is right. FREE! Many city buses connect to the train stations as well so they have it going on in SLC. It worked a treat for us and saved a costly car rental for the week. My wife already has a car and we did not want rent another for just the daytime hours whilst she was at work.
My daughter and I were actually kind of worn out and spent most of the day resting in the hotel room. After my wife arrived from work we looked up local restaurants in SLC and settled on The Copper Onion. A cursory web search of "best of" type recommendations for SLC turned up their name and the reviews looked good. So we hied ourselves downtown and had dinner. I was not overly impressed. The place has atmosphere oozing from the corners. Very friendly and attentive staff. I have zero complaints about service. The food was another matter. I had a special of pork cheeks over seasoned black eyed peas. Sounded like a great combination. Yet I found it lacking. The pork was as tender as can be. And you can tell the chef wanted it to stand on its own rather than be lost in a bunch of seasonings. Normally this would be great thinking. However, it just fell flat for me. The meat cuts were tiny. About two and a half inches long and maybe 3/4 inch thick. The black eyed peas were seasoned with I don't know what. They were not bad but again, uninspiring. The combination was not that well executed and I thought it would have been okay at 9-11 dollars but not at the $14 I paid. My wife had a duck dish that consisted of some sort of sauce over some very large, Parmesan cheese encrusted steak fries. And of course, pieces of duck. It was much better than my dish but it was extremely salty and to our tastes did not warrant a $16 price tag. It would have if refined a bit. I really do not want to dismiss this restaurant since it has some very nice potential. And as noted the atmosphere is grand. Look at their menu. The items are different now and I think this is good direction for any mildly upscale restaurant to take. Again, I would need convincing overall since if you look at their menu many entrees are solidly in the $20-30 range. This is still a hefty price range for this cowboy. And I expect a bit better detail to the dishes. I have to add the desserts did not fare a lot better. We had the 'warm apple cake' and 'bread pudding'. Neither were that good. The cake seemed poorly executed. A sponge that was a bit too dry and the apple content was sparse and not all that flavourful. The bread pudding was just bad. Very dense and not creamy/buttery smooth like mum's homemade. Flavour was okay but texture was too dense and cheese like.
Okay, had enough? I will leave off for now. If you would like to know more I will post it. We did have an extremely nice dinner experience later in the week. The weekend was fun as well.
Cheers, Todd
Day 1. 19, July. We departed Kansas City International about 6:15AM CDT. Now as I mentioned in a thread in the barber shop, this was my first air flight. I suppose it is a bit of a joke to make fifty years without having done so before but the need or opportunity never arose. To say it was a bit of a knuckle whitener upon takeoff is...accurate. The pilot had a very full, heavily loaded 737 to get in the air and the engines were roaring full blast. I have to admit I was a bit light in the stomach at the acceleration and liftoff. The 737 we flew in had the lcd screens in the seat backs so you could monitor the flight progress in live time or rent a movie. Since it is only a two hour flight we just read books on the Kindle Fire and watched the progress map. It took me awhile to shake off the jitters of being four and a half miles in the air with no escape if something went awry. A pinch over two hours later we landed in Salt Lake City and the other passengers noted they thought it was a smoother than normal descent and landing. The chap I sat next to told me he makes the flight almost weekly and the updrafts at SLC international usually make for some bumpy landings. I took his word for it and thanked the Lord it was relatively smooth. Okay, laugh out loud now at the greenhorn flier.
After we found our checked baggage we made our way to the Trax station at the airport. This is a very nice electrified train system that runs North to South and East to West through Salt Lake and some of the surrounding suburbs. If I am correct I believe the line to the airport just opened this spring. It was a paltry $2.50 per ticket to ride nearly fifteen miles from SLC Int. to end of line at Sandy which was only a half mile from our hotel. The hotel staff picked us up gratis and brought us to the front door. Nice service. If you visit SLC do check out the Trax system. It is powered like the old street cars here in K.C. years ago. Overhead lines with a boom that reaches up to them to make contact. Very smooth, very quiet ride. The lines are named by colour. Red, Blue, and Green. There is also a line called Frontrunner that runs from well north of SLC South to Provo. You can transfer between lines at at least two different stations and the coloured lines connect at a number of different stations in Salt Lake City. So you can get from airport to downtown or south or even Eastward with only a train hop or two. And pricing is superb. As I said, one way is $2.50. Round trip is $5.00. All day pass is $6.25. And the nicest part is there is a free ride zone in the heart of the city that makes shopping and moving around a breeze. And the price is right. FREE! Many city buses connect to the train stations as well so they have it going on in SLC. It worked a treat for us and saved a costly car rental for the week. My wife already has a car and we did not want rent another for just the daytime hours whilst she was at work.
My daughter and I were actually kind of worn out and spent most of the day resting in the hotel room. After my wife arrived from work we looked up local restaurants in SLC and settled on The Copper Onion. A cursory web search of "best of" type recommendations for SLC turned up their name and the reviews looked good. So we hied ourselves downtown and had dinner. I was not overly impressed. The place has atmosphere oozing from the corners. Very friendly and attentive staff. I have zero complaints about service. The food was another matter. I had a special of pork cheeks over seasoned black eyed peas. Sounded like a great combination. Yet I found it lacking. The pork was as tender as can be. And you can tell the chef wanted it to stand on its own rather than be lost in a bunch of seasonings. Normally this would be great thinking. However, it just fell flat for me. The meat cuts were tiny. About two and a half inches long and maybe 3/4 inch thick. The black eyed peas were seasoned with I don't know what. They were not bad but again, uninspiring. The combination was not that well executed and I thought it would have been okay at 9-11 dollars but not at the $14 I paid. My wife had a duck dish that consisted of some sort of sauce over some very large, Parmesan cheese encrusted steak fries. And of course, pieces of duck. It was much better than my dish but it was extremely salty and to our tastes did not warrant a $16 price tag. It would have if refined a bit. I really do not want to dismiss this restaurant since it has some very nice potential. And as noted the atmosphere is grand. Look at their menu. The items are different now and I think this is good direction for any mildly upscale restaurant to take. Again, I would need convincing overall since if you look at their menu many entrees are solidly in the $20-30 range. This is still a hefty price range for this cowboy. And I expect a bit better detail to the dishes. I have to add the desserts did not fare a lot better. We had the 'warm apple cake' and 'bread pudding'. Neither were that good. The cake seemed poorly executed. A sponge that was a bit too dry and the apple content was sparse and not all that flavourful. The bread pudding was just bad. Very dense and not creamy/buttery smooth like mum's homemade. Flavour was okay but texture was too dense and cheese like.
Okay, had enough? I will leave off for now. If you would like to know more I will post it. We did have an extremely nice dinner experience later in the week. The weekend was fun as well.
Cheers, Todd
