| I bought that shirt from Napoleon Dynamite about five hours earlier. Now I was about to see... |
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| ...his house! I watched a reaction video for Napoleon Dynamite about a month before the trip and thought "Hey. that is set in Idaho. I wonder where it was filmed." |
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| I was happy to discover that Preston was on the route I was already going to take. This was the high school where so much of the movie took place. |
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| Vote for Pedro! This was his house, in
front of which Napoleon and Pedro were jumping Pedro's sweet bike.
Pedro was more successful. There were some other filming locations around, but the only other ones I would have wanted to see were far out of town and would have take precious time out of an already long day. |
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| Preston is just about eight miles from the Utah border. |
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| Utah was the fifth state visited, just to get to the Golden Spike National Historic Park. |
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| They have replicas of the Central Pacific Jupiter and Union Pacific No. 119 (a much less creative name) where the original two trains met and the last spike in the transcontinental railroad was driven on May 10, 1869 at 12:17 p.m. |
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| I suppose it was somewhere in this area. Instead of a golden spike, now there is a stained railroad tie and a small plaque. If you are interested, it says "The last tie laid on this completion of the Pacific Railroad, May 1869." and then a bunch of names, one of which is Leland Stanford. In addition to being a governor of California, a U.S. Senator and founding Stanford University, he was an executive for the Central Pacific Railroad. |
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| That is quite an impressive feat. I mean, it's about ten miles from my house to the airport. I could not imagine track from here to there being laid in one day. |
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| It was a short visit at the park because it would be closing soon and it was already late in the day. On the drive back the large array of solar panels are quite obvious. |
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| It's simple. It's easy. It's part of everyone's job. |
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| Northrup Grumman has a rather large manufacturing and testing facility out here in northern Utah. This is a rocket garden with some of their rockets on display. Speaking of safety, in researching for my pictures I found that there was an explosion on April 16 that destroyed one of their buildings and a rocket booster test explosion the week after my trip. Safety first always indeed. |
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| Back in Idaho for good. Well, until tomorrow when I fly out. |
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| The I-84 heading to Twin Falls was very windy. There was a lot of dust blowing that affected visibility in the distance. |
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| I wonder if the wreck I detoured around was caused by the dust storm. Fortunately I came up on the backup right at an exit, where I got off and drove a parallel road until I passed it. It was at least a couple of miles. |
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| Finally, after over twelve and a half hours since leaving Butte I arrived at Twin Falls, Idaho. |
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| I had never heard of My Place hotels
before. It seemed along the lines of a Super 8. Nothing fancy. It had gotten rather cold and very windy and since I got in so late I did not feel like heading back out to look for dinner. The hotel was located right next to a Shell station with a store, so I just grabbed a sandwich and ate in the room. |
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