But today was a really nice day. My dad and I crossed the Great Salt Flats and visited Saltair (which is not actually the original building). Some brief background, in case you're in the dark like I was:
Saltair was originally built in the late 1800's as an amusement park on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Misfortune (and fire) befell the place again and again, and after reconstruction and several revival attempts, it burned down for good thanks to arson in the 1960's. A concert hall, modeled after the original architecture of the Saltair, now sits about a mile down the shore from where the original structure was first constructed. If that's not enough history for you, Wikipedia's there to help.
Anywho, we stopped there because--and this interest is fairly prototypical of my family--the park was used in the 1962 film Carnival of Souls, which is a wonderfully eerie gem that's been lost in the annals of horror history. Its influence on contemporary cinema is fairly remarkable; George Romero once even said that it was the film that inspired him to make Night of the Living Dead, which ghouls gave way to the zombies Romero crafted in Dawn of the Dead. Which is basically a roundabout way of saying that zombies, as they stand as a contemporary cultural phenomenon, might not exist were it not for this film. And all of that disregarded, it's just a darn-good horror film that scares my pants off every time.
Anyway, if I did a good job selling it at all, here's a poor-quality version of the full movie on YouTube, courtesy of the public domain:
After we left the moderately-depressing site of Saltair, we passed through Salt Lake City, saw some mountain storms, and listened to The Association, which was one of my dad's favorite groups back in the day. I'd never really listened to them before, but they have some super-smooth melodies and harmonies. It was rewarding to see the look on my dad's face when I pulled up their music on the stereo, because he hadn't heard them since he was in school. Here's a video of them performing the song "Along Comes Mary" on the Smothers Brothers; it's pretty wonderful if you ask me.
-From And Then...Along Comes The Association (1966)
And that's all I've got for today, so here are some photos from the road!
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| Salt Flats, looking South from I-80 |
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| I swear there are ghouls living here |
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| Minarets! |
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| I-80, just west of Salt Lake City |
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| Utah Highway 6 |
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| Just East of Wellington, Utah |
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| Utah Highway 6, looking West |
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