Utah Trip Day 2: Saturday, July 2, 2011

I realized that in my last post, I forgot to mention which part of Utah that we visit with our time share. Every other year we come to Park City - about 40 minutes East of Salt Lake City. The Utah Olympic Park and training facilities are located here and some of the events from the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic games were held at this site, too. The terrain here is beautiful and our time share property sits at the base of one of the valley's many ski resorts (ours is The Canyons).

Today we kind of took it easy. We took our time in the morning with breakfast and the such and then headed up to the Olympic Park for a freestyle ski jumping show at one o'clock. You're probably thinking, "It's summer, how in the world are you going to watch ski jumping??" Hang on, though, because I am about to blow your mind. At this facility, they have special ski jumps that are coated with plastic hairs - like grass - and when wet, have very little traction and makes it ideal for skiing. But that only addresses half of the actual issue of summer jumping. Sure you could ski down, go off the jump and fly in the air, but what about the landing? There is not enough snow to make a runway! But check this out, they actually have a massive swimming pool for the jumpers to land in! At the bottom of the pool are pipes that, when cued, release tons of bubbles before the skier lands in the water. The purpose of this is to break the surface tension so that the athletes sink a little instead of hitting the hard surface of the water flat out (like a belly flop but from 50 feet in the air). The summer ski jumpers' attire included life vests and swim trunks/pants and a helmet. Not your typical skier, huh? They even had skis with large slits cut into them to make swimming with them on a little easier. Phew! Man, I am getting tired just thinking about it! But this arial show was truly spectacular! Hopefully I will put some videos of the show up on my Facebook or YouTube page some time next week.

After the ski jumping show, we rode the Xtreme Zipline - one of the many fun activities open to the public at the Park (for a price of course...). The zip line is supposedly the World's Steepest Zipline, running along side the K 120 ski jump hill and reaching up to 50 miles per hour! Needless to say, it was pretty fun :). Also at the park you can ride the bobsled on the actual Olympic track, ride an Alpine slide, or even learn to ski jump for real.

Afterwards, we hit up World Market for lunch and indulged ourselves in the most amazing free samples ever! You think Costco is good? This was ten times better. Samles included divine cheesecake, jalepeño jelly, goat cheese, etc. Can you say delicious?

We got back around four and were fortunate to find that our room accomedations had been fixed and we could move over then. Of course this made us happy, although Morgan was a little disappointed because they had told us if they could not get the issue resolved, they would place us in the Presidential Suite. We joked that we were going to rub it in that kid-from-the-elevator's face if it really happened, but alas, it did not. But now we have our spacious condo again and we love it.

Later that evening, we drove to Oakley, Utah for professional rodeo. Morgan was ecstatic for she LOVES horses. I, on the other hand, have never gotten into that scene due to my allergy to horses and hay, and because of that, I was a little bit afraid of attending. But we went anyways and it turned out to be pretty fun. In my opinion, the barrel racing and rodeo clowns were the best parts. I enjoyed the other events, but I always felt that it was unfair to the animals and I felt bad for them. Nonetheless, we all had a blast and all I did was sneeze a couple of times. At the end, there was a fantastic firework display and a great spirit amongst everyone in the crowd. :)