The British are coming!!!

We had 4 days to make it from New Orleans to Salt Lake City – 2000 miles. Thank god for the IPOD – we loaded it with podcasts and used the rest of the time to read Alice’s first draft of her novel. Enough said – we made it into SLC about 7 P.M. on Tuesday – with Jean and Gordon arriving the next day.

Gordon was flying in from Charlotte, N.C. – taking a much deserved break from his crazy corporate life –traveling from the U.K. to the U.S. to China, to Copenhagen, to Munich. He arrived on time – with news that poor Jean had missed one of her connecting flights (Manchester to Amsterdam to Minneapolis to Salt Lake) (Some idiot didn’t make the flight- so all the luggage had to be unloaded to get the bag off the plane). So, we took Gordon back to the motorhome and waited… her 7:10 P.M. scheduled arrival time turned into a midnight arrival. But, ever the trooper, she managed to rally for a few hours before crashing.

With the rain and cold of England, Jean likes to escape to the States for a bit of sunshine and warmth. But, she typically brings the English weather with her- at least for a while. On our trip to New Orleans, we encountered a hurricane – this time, SLC was giving us cold, damp, rainy weather. Quite a change from the typical sunshine and cool mountain breezes. Fortunately, we had a full agenda of Mormon sites to visit—and did a bit of re-arranging to make sure we did the inside ones first.

We gave them the full LDS experience – from the “Story of Joseph Smith” at the old Hotel Utah (now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building) to a tour of Temple Square, the Beehive House (Brigham Young’s House). We even managed to hear the Sunday concert of the “Mo-Tab” (the Mormon Tabernacle Choir). We took a bit of a break from all the excitement to spend an afternoon in Park City.

To satisfy the big machinery fetish for the boys, we took a drive to the Kennicott Copper Mine, the largest open pit copper mine in the world. While Jean and I scoped out the gift store and got a few copper trinkets, the guys were taking the full tour.

Quick facts from the Kennecott Mine web site: http://www.kennecott.com/
About the Mine
* Kennecott's Bingham Canyon Mine has produced more copper than any mine in history - about 17 million tons.
* The mine is 2-1/2 miles across at the top and 3/4 of a mile deep. You could stack two Sears Towers on top of each other and still not reach the top of the mine.
* The mine is so big, it can be seen by the space shuttle astronauts as they pass over the United States.
* By 2015, the mine will be at least 500 feet deeper than it is now.
* If you stretched out all the roads in the open pit mine, you'd have 500 miles of roadway - enough to reach from Salt Lake City to Denver.
About the Equipment
* The giant electric shovels in the mine can scoop up as much as 98 tons in a single bite -- about the weight of 50 cars.
* The newest shovels each cost $8 million and weigh 2.5 million pounds.
* The trucks that haul the ore are larger than many houses and weigh more than a jumbo jet. They stand over 23 feet tall and can carry from 255 to 360 tons of rock.
* The truck driver rides about 18 feet above the ground -- nearly two stories high.
* Each tire on these big trucks costs from $18,000 to $26,000 and lasts just 9 months.
* The crusher in the pit takes in about 140,000 tons of ore every day and grinds it into chunks smaller than the size of a basketball.
* At 1,215 feet tall, the Kennecott smokestack is the highest structure in Utah.