Getting appointments done and roads in Utah

I had checked on Groupon and there were a couple of deals that I decided to take advantage of... I hadn't gotten my hair cut since February, so it was needing attention... and I needed a pedicure, and found a place that had a package deal of a pedicure, massage, and facial - so I got ALL of those things accomplished on Friday! You'll need to trust me that the massage and facial felt great and my feet are in much better shape,

Dwayne drove me to the hair salon so he took pictures at the end when the stylist was telling me about how to fix my hair. It will NEVER look like this again while I'm in charge of it - but the picture can show how it is SUPPOSED to look. The amazing thing is that all that curl was just "in" my hair!

The other topic for today regards roads in Utah.

I mentioned a few weeks ago about how the roads in the countryside in Kansas are numbered and a mile apart so Rd 54 and Rd 56 are two miles apart (http://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2018/06/observations.html) - well, the Utah roads have a few interesting characteristics...

One is that they are in "hundreds" instead of starting at "1st" street, and they are in quadrants around the center.

So in addition to going "East on W North Temple" (which I commented on a couple of days ago), you see the third direction down is "Turn left on E 400 S". In other cities, this would be "Turn left on East 4th Street".

The result is the addresses look like they have multiple 'house numbers' and no street name - like the mailing address of where we are staying is 1399 W 2100 S. When I was putting that into one of the order sites last week, it kept on saying that it thought the address was not formed correctly - finally I found a button to press that essentially said, "Trust me, it is correct." I guess this means that the address is about 14 blocks west and maybe 21 blocks south of somewhere (maybe the center of town?). When we drove into Ogden, we found that 2100 becomes 21st Street in downtown. So, in some places they have shorter numbered streets.

I have not found that the roads are necessarily an even distance apart (so the distance between 2000 and 2400 is not necessarily 4 times the distance between 2000 and 2100).

Another interesting thing is that the Utah state highways have a beehive around their route numbers:

Or, I guessed that they were beehives.

Other states have the outline of their state (Texas and Arizona, for example - you can check here for others).
I thought that I could ask the folks that I was getting services from today if they knew why... the massage lady said that she didn't know. The hair styling guy said that he thought it was because Utah is the "Beehive State".
I asked, "Why is it the Beehive state? Does it have lots of bees?"
"Not really, I think it had something to do with the Mormons being busy as bees."

Sure enough (https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol/utah/state-cultural-heritage-symbol/beehive):

Official State Emblem of Utah

In 1959, Utah designated the beehive as the official state emblem (along with the state motto: "Industry"). Industry is directly associated with the symbol of the beehive - early Utah pioneers had very few available resources and had to rely on their own "industry" to survive.

(Parenthetical note: that's an interesting website - I was thinking, "I don't think Virginia or Texas have a 'State Emblem'" so I went to check, and neither of them do, but Virginia has a state dog breed (American Foxhound) as does Texas (Blue Lacy), and Texas also has a state epic poem ('Legend of Old Stone Ranch') - in addition to a lot of other interesting "state" things. Your state legislatures at work, I'm sure!)

Finally, when the Garmin is giving us directions, and we are to turn onto a "Utah" state route, she says something like "Yut-a 126" with less of a second syllable than I would usually use when saying the state name (like the first two syllables of "Rut-a-ba-go"). It made me think it was saying something like "Ute" (the Indian tribe) in two syllables, and then I got to wondering where the state name came from. The state government website says that is the case (http://historytogo.utah.gov/facts/statefacts.html):

The state of Utah is named after the Utes, an American Indian tribe.

That's it on the history and road lecture for today!