Visit to the State of Utah

As soon as we learned that Mark’s school would start online, we decid­ed to go on vaca­tion for about 10 days. We fig­ured that study­ing online could be done remote­ly, and by August 21, Vali should fin­ish her class­es and exams.

We read reviews of var­i­ous time­shares and hotels. Due to the coro­n­avirus, hotel prices had dropped, and they all eager­ly shared how well their clean­ing ser­vices were work­ing and what safe­ty mea­sures they had imple­ment­ed due to the pandemic.

We booked a time­share from Sat­ur­day, August 22, for 10 days in the ski town of Park City, near Salt Lake City in Utah.

We left home ear­ly in the morn­ing. The route passed through the town of Page, and the nav­i­ga­tor indi­cat­ed that it would take about 10 hours. Con­sid­er­ing the stops, we arrived by evening. We also took a spray bot­tle filled with sev­er­al bot­tles of alco­hol from home and dis­in­fect­ed all the rooms and fur­ni­ture, washed the dish­es, and changed the bed­ding (we now bring our own pil­lows and blankets).

There were few peo­ple in the hotel, and all staff and vis­i­tors wore masks. The pool, jacuzzi, and grill were oper­a­tional, but to use them (to main­tain dis­tanc­ing), we had to sign up in advance at the recep­tion, and at the des­ig­nat­ed time, we were giv­en a key to the area we want­ed to use. We had no issues with advance reser­va­tions. There were also some board games avail­able, but we didn’t use them. The gym was closed and not operational.

Deer Valley

Park City is a small resort town in Utah. Once a min­ing set­tle­ment where coal was extract­ed from the moun­tains, it is now a famous ski resort with numer­ous hotels, ski runs, and many lifts to these slopes. It is also the site of the annu­al Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, which takes place in late Jan­u­ary. In the sum­mer, the town is filled with hik­ing tourists and cyclists.

Deer Val­ley is the resort area of the town, fea­tur­ing many hotels and lifts to the moun­tains. We ascend­ed to the moun­tain’s peak, from where there was a beau­ti­ful view of the town and a large lake.

There were few hik­ing tourists; most were on moun­tain bikes. I had nev­er seen such a num­ber of moun­tain bik­ers on the roads as here; I had­n’t seen any­where else. The moun­tain had bike trails of vary­ing dif­fi­cul­ty, just like the ski trails — green, blue, black. Cyclists took their bikes to the moun­tain peak via the lifts and then descend­ed the trails on their bikes. In the park­ing lot in front of the moun­tain, cars were parked with bikes attached to spe­cial racks, usu­al­ly 3 – 4 bikes each. It was Sun­day, and appar­ent­ly, many peo­ple from the sur­round­ing areas come to town on week­ends because the num­ber of cyclists in the city decreased dur­ing the week.

August 24, Monday.

The school allowed remote learn­ing, but we over­looked one detail — although Ari­zona and Utah are in the same time zone, Utah, unlike Ari­zona, observes Day­light Sav­ing Time, result­ing in a one-hour time dif­fer­ence. Class­es at the school start­ed at 9:30 AM and end­ed at 4:25 PM local time. School took almost the entire day, and we could only go out in the evenings. Nev­er­the­less, the weath­er was won­der­ful; we didn’t turn on the air con­di­tion­ing and lived with the win­dows open. Evenings were cool and fresh, and we went for walks and swam in the pool.

One evening, we vis­it­ed the town’s cen­tral area. Main Street, where var­i­ous shops and restau­rants are locat­ed, was almost emp­ty due to the coro­n­avirus. Usu­al­ly, Park City has many tourists. Almost every­one was wear­ing masks. Many restau­rants were closed.