Where There Is Smoke

Maybe we were crazy to try and drive to Cedar City and back in one day, but it shouldn't have been as hard as it turned out to be. We've lived in Utah for a long time, but we've never made it to the Shakespearean Festival. Now that it looks like we'll be living here semi-permanently, we're trying to take more advantage of all that Utah has to offer. And we're trying to convince ourselves that we can enjoy living here as much as we enjoyed living in Los Angeles. Really, Utah is a great place, but it's been a tough adjustment for the two of us since we didn't grow up here. Last winter was especially rough with the inversion and all the cold, dark days. But we're trying to overcome our bad attitudes and summer is a wonderful time to be in Utah with lots going on and plenty to do.

Because this was our first time to go to the Shakespearean Festival and we were too cheap to get a hotel, we figured we'd just drive down in the morning, catch a matinee, and then drive back after the play. Unfortunately Dan picked up my head cold just in time to feel congested the entire Saturday. So things started out rough for him. Otherwise the drive down wasn't too bad and I really enjoyed the play (Twelfth Night). Dan slept through the first twenty minutes, but then he woke up and enjoyed it enough to decide he'd like to come back sometime when he didn't feel so rotten. After the play, based on my sister's recommendation, we stopped at The Pastry Pub, which I now also highly recommend. I'm really not a foody, but the food was great and the atmosphere was cozy. It was a great way to cap off our Cedar City experience.

We should have realized that things weren't going to go as planned, when on our drive down we saw a sign that said "Danger wild fire right lane closed next 24 miles." We laughed about the absurdity of the sign. If a wild fire was really close enough to be dangerous, it's not like driving in the left lane would be that much protection. But apparently while we were at the play, things did get really dangerous, and two people were killed on I-15 due to low visibility from the smoke. That caused the highway patrol to close the freeway for over ninety-five miles. So at the turn off to HWY 20, near Beaver, we sat in traffic for two hours while they forced us off the freeway over to HWY 89. Even though we were on the other side of the mountain range and we didn’t really know what was going on, we could tell that there was a lot of smoke because it got dark earlier.

This picture was taken from HWY 89 and looks like a nice sunset until you notice the smoke. For the most part, I enjoyed the drive home. After all HWY 89 is much more scenic, but that's also why it's slower and part of the reason why it took us nearly six hours to drive home. It wasn't all bad though. When we were directed onto I-70 eastbound, there was a family at the stop sign passing out free bottled water. The sight caused me to tear up a bit, but as we all now know, that's not saying much for me. We were all sort of annoyed by the detour, but when I learned this morning that the fire had crossed the freeway before the highway patrol closed it, I realized that perhaps we were lucky to come along later.

We've now learned our lesson. Next time we go to Cedar City, we'll get a hotel room. I'm just glad Dan's still considering a next time. And it seems that in addition to planning for snow storms in the winter, we'll also have to start planning for wild fires in the summer.