Midnight in Salt Lake City. Gene realized he needed his phone charger from the car and went out for it. When he got back in, he said “You need to come see this.”

Incidentally: Salt Lake City? Not what you’d expect. Sure, they’ve got the giant Mormon temple compound at Temple Square, with dozens of well-sleeved Mormon brides and their fellas posed by every fountain to take pictures, but the city itself is less than fifty percent Mormon. And the non-Mormon counter-culture takes pains to really announce itself. You see a lot of tattoos and facial piercings, a lot of big loud I AM NOT A MORMON declarations. And yes, there are plenty of places to get alcohol: our hotel was in walking distance of three brewpubs and countless bars.

But back to that midnight. We were staying downtown, where the streets are about seven lanes wide, but at that time of night there was almost no traffic, barring an occasional taxi or cop car. The air was bathwater warm. And across the street from our hotel, something very strange was going on.

I have to say, I wasn’t expecting to find cool things to do in Salt Lake City, but I was so wrong. We found a museum a few blocks from our hotel that had asked local artists to create fantastical mini-golf holes, and they’d built a course you could play on for free. There were sculptures to golf through, and fabrics, and little cities. Several holes had moving parts, and one was hooked up to an old Donkey Kong arcade game that played a fun little graphic if you got a hole in one. It was ridiculously fun.

But I was telling you about this midnight experience. Across the street, a man was playing piano on the corner. He’d welded himself a little trailer which held an upright piano, and he’d towed this piano with his bicycle all the way to this corner. We came and sat down with a few other people who were there, and listened to this guy and his friend play Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven with remarkable skill, as well as some original stuff. Just us, the moon, the midnight and a little flutter of piano keys. It was surreal and wonderful, and then Gene told the guy to come to the Bay Area and play live on KALX, which always makes me feel like a big shot record executive, or at least a big shot record executive’s wife.

We didn’t take many pictures in Salt Lake City — too busy having fun and drinking a lot — but what pictures we did take are here. You can also see pictures from our drive out of Yellowstone past the Grand Tetons and along the National Parks Highway.

We toured the Deschutes Brewery in Bend and spent two nights camping in Eastern Oregon. I won’t get into those, because we were perfectly happy and it’s impossible to be interesting about perfect happiness. (Unless you are Dorothy L. Sayers and writing Busman’s Honeymoon. But I am no Sayers.)

We drove across Idaho, where we we collected my favorite road sign:

We were able to secure a campsite in Yellowstone with no notice — something I did not believe possible — and arrived there shortly before sunset. We got the stove and tent set up in short order and had dinner, washed dishes and built a fire.

Then Gene noticed that the trees, which normally point up at the sky in a tree-ish sort of way, were being bent nearly horizontal by a high wind. Curious, we investigated further and discovered that the sky was slowly filling with a big, rolling cloud, the sort you expect to see with an angry cartoon face drawn on it. In case we had missed the point, some lightning zipped about the sky in a peppy sort of way.

A few minutes later, the storm arrived properly, with torrential rain and thunder and all those weathery sorts of things. We had the tent down and in the backseat of the car, with ourselves in the front, in under a minute. (Lest you think this is easy, I will tell you that the tent contained two heavy moving blankets, two inflated Therma-rests, two unrolled down sleeping bags, two pillows and assorted nighttime gear, and we also had to remove the dew cover on top and the tarp beneath.)

Well, a night in the car never hurt anyone, and luckily we had pirate-themed Mad Libs from Nuala and Garren which kept us entertained until bedtime.

The next day we drove all over Yellowstone. Well, not all over, because it’s the size of a state, but we did see quite a bit. We also saw a bald eagle, a baby moose, many sorts of deer, an absurd number of bison, an otter, a brown bear and a pack of wolves.

I recommend Yellowstone to anyone who likes things that are weird but good. It’s the Bi-Rite Salted Caramel ice cream of the National Parks system. Check out some pictures of the park here.

My man: weird but good.

We drove to Crater Lake and arrived around dinner time — and not just for us. The area was swarming with more mosquitoes than I’ve ever seen in my life. (We found out later this is because the valley is basically a lake with a thin layer of soil on top. There is a 14-inch water table in some places, meaning you only have to dig down 14 inches to find water.)

Now, I don’t know how you feel about being eaten alive, but we’re not huge fans. We swatted fast and furiously — and successfully; they were remarkably slow and stupid — but what the mosquitoes lacked in brain power and agility they made up in numbers. We were both glad we weren’t camping that night.

The next day I was pretty much ready to get on our bull and ride out of town, and we hadn’t even seen the lake yet.

But then we did see it.

And we stared.

And we stared.

And we stared.

The thing about the lake is, there aren’t any boats on it. There’s one company that runs boat tours, but even they were closed while we were there, and other than that there are no fishermen, motorboats, jet skis, kayakers, nil. Nothing to disturb the reflection in the lake. Which, as you can see, is astonishing enough to be worth getting out of the car and standing there, stunned, for long minutes, while tiny little Cullen-bugs suck my blood out.

You can see more pictures of the lake here, and pictures of our drive along the Rogue River just before that here.