Christmas in Oakland

Jons father Steve ist a farmer and therefor he needs a BIG tractor...	..a Pick-up-...	... and a BIG truck, with which he brings his soybeans and corn to the selling point. He took me for a ride from the farm back to Oakland, the little town in Iowa where Jon grew up.
In Hancock, a small town near Oakland, there's a park with elks...	... and buffaloes.	Buffalo riding is fun.
An elk with large antlers.	Sometimes the neighbor's cat comes visiting my parents-in-law. Somehow it can always make it into the house.	The horse of Steve's friends that I rode lives in this barn. During the daytime in winter the horses live on a paddock behind the barn.
There are no official trails for horse riders or hikers between the endless corn fields and pastures. That's why we rode next to a little creek on their private ground and on a pasture where we could let the horses lope.	It's so great to be back on a horse again!	We visited a farm full of beautiful belgian draft horses. The girl in the picture is Krystal, Jon's sister's niece who went horseriding with us.
The foals a quite shy and don't approach us to closely.	For these enormous horse they need a decent trailer, because they drive them on horse shows.

Christmas with my new American family was very nice, because they are all lovely people, open and friendly and maybe a little crazy. I really enjoyed our stay there.
Kansas City, where we stay tonight, lies on the border between Missouri and Kansas and is an interesting town with much live music played in bars, but we are not very motivated to got out and discover. It was a short drive today and so we're just stay in the hotel room tonight relaxing after the holidays filled with action and visits of the different branches of Jon large family (he has more than ten aunts and uncles who were all curious to see his new wife).

Dec 17 2005 Mormons and snow

To get a bit of culture and because we were curious of the church we took the train to downtown Salt Lake City.

That's in fact quite large and as we didn't have much time we just visited the very special and specific of the city, that is Temple Square, pratically the soul of Mormon believe.

That is of course not the real name of the organization. They read, besides the bible, the book of Mormon (another testament of Jesus Christ to them), as we learned during an half hour guide through the Temple area.
The Temple itself took over 40 years to be built, as the rocks had to be brought there with the help of oxens within 4 days. It cannot be visited by tourists, because it is considered to be too holy for us in their eyes.

The two young women that led our tour were volunteers who were performing their Mormon service for one and a half year. Young men have to do two years. They are not getting paid by the church but had to support themselves however they saw fit.

They led us through the two visitor centers and showed us some other buildings like a smaller chapel which was built to thank God for the miracle of the seagulls. In their first year that they were in Salt Lake City, crickets came and almost destroyed their harvest. The Mormons prayed to have their crops saved, and according to them God sent seagulls that ate all the crickets (this really did happen, this is why the seagull is the Utah state bird.). Because of this miracle, the pioneers were saved from starving!
We got many lessons in Mormon beliefs (they were heavily focused on the family structure) and in the end we were supposed to fill out a guest card, but we avoided this in the last minute, signed their equivalent of a guest book and left the Temple Square to the train which took us back to the hotel.

Next, we went skiing in the high mountains around Salt Lake City.
After a quick lunch we drove to Brighton, the highest ski resort in the region.
There wasn't much snow in the city and in the foothills, so we worried if they were using snow machines to get enough snow for skiing. But, when we reached the higher mountains the snow was deeper. Much deeper. All of 54 inches in depth deep! Fortunately the road to the ski resort was free of snow, so we could drive to Brighton real quick.

Dec 16 2005 Reno - Salt Lake City

View from our hotel room in Reno on 10th floor.	During the week the rooms in the nicer hotels are also dirt cheap. We pay $30 at the Hotel Casino Eldorado.	Dry mountains in Nevada.
There's not much hier but dry grass...	... and snowcoverd peaks in the distance.	The road I80 leads from San Francisco to New York...
... and doesn't take many curves.	We're driving straight. Endlessly.	Short break and changing of drivers in Valmy.
Rest Area Valmy	Gaining information at the visitor center in Battle Mountain.	On the road again.
The first and only tunnel of the day. Otherwise the road was just build around the mountains.	Rocks	Into the great wide open.
Star-spangled Banner		The names for some towns are just more than once. We're still in Nevada and haven't surprisingly reached Hollywood.
We're driving further and further east. That's also why the sun is going down earlier.	Many gas stations in Nevada have integrated casinos. We just fill up fuel and change drivers again.	Sunset in the desert.
	The trees seem to be out of place after a day in the desert.

When we reach the border to Utah and the Mountain Standard Time Zone, that steals us an hour, it is already dark. So we don't see much of the Great Salt Lake and the City.