Traveling to Salt Lake

We're counting down now. Tomorrow it will be three weeks until the opening day of the conference. We are so excited you are coming.

I'm Janet Hovorka, currently serving as Vice President of the host society, the Utah Genealogical Association. As we've gotten closer to the conference, I've gotten permission to jump in here and tell you about this city that I love. I spent a large chunk of my growing up years here on the Wasatch Front and I also spent a large chunk of my growing up years traveling. Consequently, I want to make sure you make the most of your visit.

To start with, let me give you some of the best websites for touristy information. If you are the type who wants to know every detail (like I am sometimes), you'll want to get well acquainted with these sites. If you're busy packing and just want the highlights, (like I am other times) stay tuned and I'll make sure you know what you need to.

My favorite site for the how to of visiting Salt Lake is the Downtown Alliance. This site is chock full of events, shopping, eating, news and etc organized well and correlated with maps and crucial information. This website is especially useful for NGS conference goers because it focuses on downtown Salt Lake--the area right around the library and the Salt Palace Convention Center.

The Salt Lake Visitor's Bureau has a great site too with shopping, activities and eating and etc. but covers the whole valley (Salt Lake and it's suburbs.) The cool thing about the Visitor's Bureau is that their offices are in the Salt Palace Convention Center, just next door to where NGS is to be held. So you'll easily be able to stop by there for directions and pamphlets and such. The site currently has a genealogy section right up front in conjunction with the Who Do You Think You Are TV program.

The Official Salt Lake City Government Site is a good site for all things Salt Lake, but the visitor's section of the site mainly points to other sites listed here. Since you won't be paying your water bill, you can pretty much pass this one up. Unless you are going to be paying for a traffic ticket, in which case you'll want to keep this one in mind.

If you are driving to the conference, you may want to take a look at the Utah State Office of Tourism website. It has wonderful resources on the other places you might want to stop off at on your way in or out of the state. Of course, if you are coming up from the South at all, you really need to take an extra day and visit some of the spectacular state parks that Utah is so proud of. Likewise Go-Utah is a great site for trip planning throughout the state.

Utah Travel Center is a conglomeration site with all sorts of information on Salt Lake City pulled from various sources. And Citysearch has user submitted reviews on everything from shopping and resturaunts to bars and churches. So it's a useful one too.

Take a look at those, and stay tuned as I take you through the ins and outs of traveling to Salt Lake City.