Our destination is back south, and Salt Lake City. We fly from here up to Vancouver at around lunchtime on the following day, but in the meantime have planned to meet an old pal of mine, Jo Edwards, at a campsite somewhere near Alta, the ski resort. As is the way with Jo, who still has no mobile phone and refuses to give out her home phone number (to me at least), plans are somewhat sketchy, but we have arranged over email to meet at a camp site just down the road from Alta. We cannot book spaces of course, but in any event booking as a concept would contravene Jo’s rules.
The drive down to Salt Lake was reasonably featureless, although bear in mind the context of the last two months, so were this to have been our first drive of the holiday, we would have been gasping at the scenery. We have “experience fatigue”. Long straight roads really allowed me to let the old girl out a bit – we touched 75mph a few times which must have lowered the fuel consumption stats a little. As we approached Salt Lake, though, the scenery gets pretty stupendous again, and you feel rather like a participant in a video game, scorching along freeways between vertiginous mountains on either side (although not in an open top red car – no blond hair flowing out the back). Finally, Salt Lake itself, and some incompetent map-reading has us motoring through suburban estates, like Robin Williams in “RV” (recommended for laughs by the way). Finally, Sarah pulls herself together, and we head up to Cotton Wood canyon, where, amazingly, we find the campsite just as Jo promised. We don’t find Jo of course, and I think both of us have resigned ourselves to the likelihood that this will be a wild goose chase. There is a space, though, and we pay our money to a grumpy Grandpa in the entry cabin and tootle off to Bay 19.
It is while we are reversing into Bay 19 that Jo turns up, all bounce and blond hair. The kids are a little startled at first, they were too young to remember Jo when she last visited Moorside, but this doesn’t last and they are soon into the swing of it. Initially, Monty remains asleep in the back of the van, but after a while emerges bleary-eyed to meet his godmother for the first time.
There are only a couple of hours’ light left by now, but we decide to pile into Jo’s car (a Scooby-Doo; great choice) and we zoom off up the hill to Alta which both Jo and office manager James Getgood have recommended for a skiing holiday one day. It doesn’t look much without snow, but you can see that the off-piste here must be pretty awesome – lots of lifts up and few guided runs down – just make your own way through the cliffs. We head off-tarmac and up to the “trailhead”, deciding to walk a mile or so up to some lake or other. It’s pretty cold.
Rather bizarrely, we meet a couple of extremely drunk fellows who can barely walk, and are making “moose” faces at us, using their hands to mimic antlers. The kids don’t really understand, but we make “moose” faces back and everyone seems to think this is very funny. Suspicions begin to build as the next group that we meet, of Asian origin (in fact, probably Asian in every sense, because they speak no English), also make “moose” faces at us. The kids, now used to this apparent Mormon greeting method, return the moose faces and we play Frisbee with them for a few minutes. The Asians cannot play Frisbee, even though it is their device, but it is great fun retrieving the disc from far away places where they have thrown it.
We move on, and it is while returning moose faces at the third group of ramblers, this time a couple of sober and very serious male hikers who also put their fingers to their lips, that we realise that a cryptic message is being conveyed, namely that we are in the presence of MOOSE. There is a side-story here, which is Sarah Goodfellow’s complete inability to spot MOOSE wherever we come upon them. This started out when we visited Jackson Hole in January 2008 and everyone but Sarah saw MOOSE. It continued through Teton and Yellowstone this trip, and then at the Spotted Horse Ranch, where MOOSE roamed freely. Sarah continued to miss out on sightings, reliably and relentlessly. This was not lost on the kids, who spared no efforts in explaining what MOOSE looked like, how big and how amazing they were and so on. So now, with the prospect of a MOOSE sighting in the offing, we are all rather nervous that some bizarre circumstance should get in the way – perhaps an alien landing, or bizarre yachting accident will intervene. Sarah is even wearing a T shirt with a picture of a moose on.
But this does not come to pass and suddenly there they are – two huge bull moose sitting grazing by the side of the path, with whacking great “racks” and whattles to match. We only have Jemima’s camera, with a fairly limited zoom, but still take plenty of photos, and Jo even manages to get the details of some professional looking geezer who is taking with a long lens, so we are sent “money shots” later on, by email (see below). 
They really are very strange looking creatures, and the children have fun seeing how close they can get without the moose getting angry. And after that, we have “broken the seal”, or duck, or whatever affliction Sarah has, and we can’t stop seeing moose – moose are everywhere that we look, we can’t get away from them and by the end of our stroll we have given up pointing them out. This despite the fact that Jo has never seen moose anywhere near this trail, so the whole experience is thoroughly strange.
After some fun taking self-timer pictures of ourselves on a rock in the middle of a lake, which involves me (Hugh) having to leap about, with the camera falling over, my getting wet feet etc., we repair back down the hill and have a very pleasant dinner in a cosy ski lodge.
By now, the kids think Jo’s absolutely great – no rules, no taboo conversation topics, plenty of laughs and they spend much of their time with their mouths open. We have quite a bit of wine, and I think maybe one of the kids drives us home in the end.
Once home, we set about lighting the camp fire, and making marshmallow sandwiches using cheese biscuits and chocolate (these concoctions have a name, which I forget).
The kids think these are foul, in fact everyone does, but we make some for the grumpy Grandpa in the camp entry hut and Jo and Mima take him up a couple to cheer him up. He turns out to be quite jolly, by all accounts – Jo just reckons he couldn’t understand our accents.
After a final stick-whittling exercise (which given that we have spent 3 weeks doing this, ends, amazingly, in a “no injury” score), the kids retire exhausted at about 10, then Sarah shortly afterwards. Jo and I put the world to rights until after 1am. Terrific to catch up with Jo, and I think she enjoyed some English company for once.
The next day dawns a little wet, but we keep warm by burning everything – and I mean everything, with the sole exceptions of our kitchen knives, some tuna fish, and spare beer which Jo takes home. We burn paper plates, pasta, sugar, crisps, marshmallows, cheese, boxes, spare loo roll - even things that don’t burn, like empty cans, onions and jam (actually, onions burn in the middle like candles, then explode). It’s all quite cathartic, and not very “green” but super fun and it keeps the rain away. Jo amuses the kids in this way while we clean out the van in preparation for its return, and then we head for the drop-off point at Camping World.
We say goodbye to Jo once again, with promises swapped to keep in touch a little more often, and then we taxi to the airport, and our departure for a final destination, Vancouver.
