It was time to visit a fire station (after all it has been a couple weeks already) and Allen had a buddy who was Captain at Unified Fire Authority Station 120. UFA had 28 stations but only had a global manning of 111 (compared to our 20 and 130). The difference was due to UFA manning their engines with 3 crew. Neil only had a month left before retirement and had his retirement motor home outside to do some work on.
They had 3 appliances at this station which included an engine, tanker and brush truck with only 3 crew members so all three appliances were cross manned depending on the callout. They station was set up for 10 crew but with the building of two new stations saw the other 7 crew moved out.
We bid farewell to Station 120 and headed off to do some people watching and shopping at Walmart. It must have been too cold as we didn’t spot anyone interesting. Sams Club next door had a restaurant if you call it one and we had the hot dog combo which was a Nathan’s hot dog and a large drink for $1.50.
Between Jenny and myself, we have bought enough stuff to break out the 4th bag. Looks like we may have to buy an extra baggage allowance from Austin as we will be taking an extra bag home from Rachael.
This afternoon we were going to check out the ski resorts in the eastern mountains – the Wasatch’s. This is where the 2002 Winter Olympics was held and Snowbird was where Allen was stationed for 10 years.
Even with the snow that fell on Wednesday, there wasn’t really enough to ski but there were a few diehards on the lower slopes where they were making snow. Most of the slopes looked reasonably steep and would be classed as black runs in Australia.
Allen pointed out a couple of vaults that are built into the mountains. One is for the LDS for the storage of important documents and the other is a private vault with unknown contents. Allen said that when they went for a fire department inspection, they were turned away by security.
On the way home, we spotted another herd of deer. We are starting to see more deer as they are moving out of the mountains due to the snow.
