Welcome to Idaho

Published on 23 September 2023 at 08:57

Saturday, 9/16/2023

As we were packing up to leave the motel in Heber City, Woody pulled the room door shut before I could tell him I didn’t have the key. We found ourselves locked out and were unable to contact anyone from the front desk to let us in.

After various attempts, we decided to go across the street and eat breakfast at Chick's... an unfortunate, great restaurant find. If you are ever locked out of your motel room in Heber City try the French Toast or genuine buckwheat pancakes at Chick's! We finally did manage to get someone to let us back into our room. We weren’t able to leave the motel until 11 AM!

It was only 39° when we got up that morning, but by the time we left it was 66°. We did a load of laundry, and updated one day of our blog. It’s hard to keep up when we seldom have Internet access.

The scenery east of Salt Lake City reminded us of the Andes foothills. Leaves are starting to turn yellow and orange. We passed Echo reservoir and suddenly were surrounded by red rock cliffs.

Near Wyoming it suddenly turned to rather barren, green-gold, rolling, high plateaus. We crossed back into Utah, and the landscape was pretty desolate. The small town of Woodruff’s claim to fame was “coldest temps, warmest hearts.“ My guess is this might be true. There were many old homes, much like pioneer cabins. The countryside was full of cattails, golden fields, and some irrigated green fields. Towns were very small and isolated on the extensive high plains. We saw many large bales of hay and occasional ranch homes and old log sheds and cabins. There were rare trees, mostly with yellow leaves.

We mailed postcards from the tiny town of Randolph, Utah. It has an interesting history. A history I may remember some day!

The road took us back into Wyoming and we saw lots of tumbleweed and barren lands with occasional cattle. We drove past Cookeville Meadows, Big Creek, Bear River, and Bear Lake.

In the afternoon we drove into Idaho for about 50 miles. Now, Woody can claim to have been in all 48 contiguous states... the same as me! Woody still hopes that someone will invite him to speak at a church or conference in Alaska. Hawaii is probably not going to happen. 

The land was very barren in Idaho before we turned back east. We immediately started winding up into the mountains where there were some pines. We stopped at Afton for some great ice cream in the lovely sunshine at 75°.

We continued driving on the Wyoming side of the border with Idaho. We stopped to see the Snake River. People were rafting down it, and the views were spectacular!

We drove on to our campsite at Colter Bay Campground in Grand Teton National Park. We could see the spectacular mountains from our lovely campsite. After setting up camp, we took a short walk and hit the sack early, planning to make the most of the next day.

Add comment

Comments

There are no comments yet.