Day 1: Bend, Oregon to Willard Bay State Park, Utah

I had a major case of the "yay bike tour!" jitters... which feels a lot like kids must feel the night before Christmas. So I woke up at 4:30 am. Oops. That was fine, our only goal was to drive as far as we could while it was light out, so we could have more time to bike the next day. It was a boring smoky drive, but the time went by quickly with good company and good conversation. 

As the day wore on, I casually joked if Anthony Bourdain had done an episode of No Reservations for Utah. [BACKSTORY: When Ani and I went to Ecuador for a 3 week bike tour, we did not realize that Anthony Bourdain had done an episode of No Reservations for Ecuador... and so randomly we watched that episode while in a random hotel in the Andes waiting for the bus to take us back to Quito to fly home. Biggest facepalm ever. We had actually stayed in one of the towns he featured and missed out on a great opportunity to check out one of the fabled places he raved about.]

And then Ani mentioned that she had heard about a famous farm-to-table restaurant called Hells Backbone Grill in one of the towns we would be going through. I was like "WHAT!?" And just like that, I pulled out the map, did some research on my phone, found a sweet back road route that would help us stretch one segment out so we could arrive at the restaurant for dinner. It would also allow us to spend a little more time on the Burr Trail, which was a feature of this trip that had sucked us into this part of Utah. Done and done.

As the sun began to set, we had our eye on a few campgrounds, but Willard Bay State Park was right next to the highway so we decided to check it out because we were a little concerned about rolling into a more remote campground on a Friday night after dark and not finding a spot and did not want to get a motel. We were pretty tired... but we balked when the attendant told us it would be $50 since all that were left were double sites, but gave in so we could just be done with it.

Our mansion of a campsite with two picnic tables. We tucked into the trees and tried to ignore the screaming children.

While I would never recommend this to anyone for camping (unless you love RVs), the one consolation prize was that the park was situated right on the water, so we tromped down to the water and watched the sun set before settling in for the night.

Our $50 sunset.