The Trip

The Payette River, Idaho

Shoshone Falls, Idaho Falls Idaho

Shoshone Falls/ Snake River

Momma  Jan at Shoshone Falls

   I thought I would spend a little time in the next few posts speaking about our trip. Obviously it means much more to me and Jan than to anyone else, so I won't go on and on, but we don't make it out of Alaska too often so when we do get a chance to go it's a kind of big deal. We left Juneau and flew to Seattle and on to Boise Idaho where we rented a car. I wasn't about to rent a car in Seattle- way too busy for me. When we got to Boise we waited for our luggage which never came. Hey... I just remembered that Alaska airlines has a policy that if you have to wait more than twenty minutes for your luggage they'll give you a twenty dollar credit or refund or some such thing. What the hell? Where's my refund? Those sapsuckers owe me forty dollars- twenty for Jan and twenty for me. It's not the first time they've lost my luggage. The last time we traveled to Wisconsin and Ohio, the airlines lost our luggage on both stops.What are the odds of that happening? Does the ticket counter put special tags on our bags that lets the baggage handlers know that they should send our stuff to San Francisco when we're on our way to Columbus or what? After a few times of having it happen, you kind of expect that they're going to lose it. I should carry a few decoy bags filled with confetti or dog crap that they can lose if they want to while I carry my bags on board and fight with the buffoons who want to try to stuff their seventy pound bags (also known as portable closets) into the overhead bin, taking up the space that is supposed to accommodate at least three passenger's luggage.  We spent the first night of our voyage in Mountain Home Idaho. A friend of ours lived there for awhile and it sounded like a nice place to visit; and it was. Kind of high desert. The folks there were friendly and the hotel was nice except for the fact that we got there on a weekend and the German Air force was visiting the air force base at Mountain Home and they all kind of converged on the hotel we were at so it was a little noisy until midnight or so. We traveled north and west on our way up to Cour'd laine, past some beautiful scenery in the mountains. Unfortunately it started raining buckets and I started thinking about mudslides since the road was right against the mountain on one side and bordered by the Payette River on the other, so we stopped short of our goal and ended up in Eastern Idaho at Idaho Falls. That was a nice place and we may opt to check it out for a winter get away some time in the future. We visited Shoshone Falls, about six miles outside of town and spent a few hours there. The sights were breathtaking and we could easily have spent the whole day there, but we needed to get underway and visit our daughter Camille in Cheyenne. We passed through a corner of Utah and saw some incredible rock formations. I asked Jan to get a picture of them at one point but she mainly got a silhouette of my nose, which I guess does somewhat resemble a rock formation, but I rather doubt if anyone would like to frame it and hang it in their living room.
We drove like mad for quite a few hours and decided to spend the night in Rawlins Wyoming. I don't think  I would ever do that again. It was by far the most expensive hotel that we stayed in and the restaurant is no more than a small tavern in the back of the the hotel. We had to listen to some drunken truckers go on about something or other. At one point some gal mentioned catching a King Salmon in Alaska and I almost ordered a beer and joined the conversation, but I was too tired and didn't want to take a chance of getting into a fight with a drunk and having my picturesque nose smashed.  The room was nothing fancy, but it kept the weather out so I guess that's what counts.  In an effort to keep this from being as long as the King James Bible, I'll go ahead and stop here and continue on in a future post. Hope you all have a great day!