Sometimes not planning ahead or locking yourself into plans when travelling can be amazing. We never would have gone to Crater Lake if we hadn’t suddenly decided to bypass far northern California and that turned out to be one of the most stunning places we’ve been to on this trip.

At other times, showing up in a city in the late evening with no accommodation can be painful. We arrived in Salt Lake City with only vague ideas of where we could camp that night and as such after hours on the road we had to negotiate (read: beg) to camp on state park grounds. We ended up wedged between the Great Salt Lake:

Some kind of refinery:

And a boat marina:

You can just see our red tent in the very middle of this photo, to the left of the row of boats:

To make things slightly worse, because the marina was holding an event the next day we had to leave before 7am. So we set up camp on a gravel car park, had a baked bean dinner (anything to avoid having to get back into the car to drive to the shops) and after a swim (Andrew, not me) settled in to watch the sunset over the salt lake.

The salt lake is an ancient inland ocean too salty for fish, the only thing that lives in there is some kind of shrimp.

The sun dipped below the horizon, meanwhile amazing dusty pinks were appearing over the mountains behind us.

The only problem with dusk was the mosquitos came out to feast on me. We went on a killing spree in the tent before going to sleep.

The refinery never looked so pretty

As an added bonus we also caught sunrise the next morning:

An interesting spot to camp, to say the least! We spent the rest of the day exploring Salt Lake City (if you missed my post on Mormonism click here) before checking into a proper camp ground the next night.