By the time of our 1997 road trip, I had spent many an hour in the Salt Lake City airport, the required layover point for Delta Airlines flights out of Anchorage to the East Coast, but I’d never been outside the doors of the airport. When we arrived in Kanab, Utah after visiting the Grand Canyon, we had finally found, as they say, what we were looking for: the best milkshakes we’d ever had, at the local Frostop in Kanab. Aimee and I drove through on our second road trip in 2006, and the place is now gone, which was a real blow to that day’s agenda. We hit at least two Frostops in Utah – somewhere between a regional name and an actual chain, the name came to mean a huge variety of flavors and thick, shakey goodness to us. Now, between the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, we spent some quality time hiking in and around both Bryce and Zion National Parks, two breathtaking spots that I hope to revisit at some point, and either one of those might have been a wiser choice for the photo here, but to be honest, when I think of Utah, I think of milkshakes.

When Aimee and I zipped from Montana to California for my first day of work in the summer of ’06, we drove the entire height of Utah on I-15, from Montana down through Idaho to Arizona, and though we managed to stop for a root beer freeze at Hires Big H in Salt Lake City, we didn’t see much beyond the edges of the interstate corridor. Next time.