Seamonkey Lake City

Okay, we all know that the United States if full of mysteries. Sometimes you'll do some traveling, and those mysterious aren't so mysterious any more. You're all like, "Ooooh, I get it. That's how they make paper!" or "So that's where babies come from!" and you're a better informed, more well-rounded individual. But sometimes, you learn something, and it makes you wish you were born with no brain...
As happened to Gussie and myself this week. As we're staying about 20 minutes away from the "great" salt lake, we figures we would go and check out this sweet island that they've turned into a sweet state park. There's a road extending from the lake's edge to the island itself, and after paying the crazy-high fee to get in, we were hit my a magnificent sight; the lake's humongous, and the water is very still... the mountains are cleanly reflected in the lake, and where the lake meets the sky on the horizon, you can't see where one stops and the other begins. In short, it's a magnificent sight to behold... and then the smell hits you. "Oooh Lord, what is that stink?" we asked ourselves, only slightly distracted from the view. The offending odor soon faded, and we happily made our way to the visitor center. It was there that the horrific learning took place. But before the horrific learning was some normal learning. Turns out that the reason the greater Salt Lake City area is constantly pestered by Seagulls (feel free to take a moment to look at a map of where Salt Lake City is as compared to any ocean or sea - the nearest as far as I can tell is about 590 miles away in the LA area) is that a huge percentage of the US bird population hangs out at the "great" salt lake on their trip's north and south every year. "Why do they do that?" I wondered. "Isn't it all salty? They don't have fish in there, do they?" Well it turns out that no, they don't. What they do have, what does grow in the lake, is sea monkeys. God awful amounts of sea monkeys. And when Gussie and I kicked off our shoes and approached the surface of the water, we had to step over hundreds of thousands of washed up and stinking sea monkeys. And when we did wade into the water, we were abruptly stopped by a reddish, rolling and impenetrable mass of disgusting, exposed-ribcage-looking sea monkeys. So that's what the stink on our drive in was; a billion dead sea monkeys. I... I can't write any more right now...*sniff*... more next week...