Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Janet's Guide To Salt Lake City--Getting Started

As a precursor to NGS in Salt Lake City in three weeks, I've decided to do a series of article posts I'm going to call "Janet's Genealogy Guide to Salt Lake City" 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. As Vice President of UGA, I'm also going to be posting these to the NGS conference blog. But I thought I'd put it here because I should probably keep a certain level of decorum over there. And you know how hard that is going to be for me. Soooooo, it will probably be more fun to read here.

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 if you are visiting the library 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 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 Who Do You Think You Are.

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 submited 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.

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