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| See what I mean about the scenery here? |
Since we're well on our way to making our own family, we decided not to spend the Fourth of July with either of our families. Just me and Michael, and we were headed on a road trip! School has been super busy, along with work and trying to exercise and get ready for the baby, so we really haven't had much time to spend together. Not quality time anyway. I don't know about you, but I don't count doing homework in the same room as spending time together, sorry. So this trip was well deserved and long awaited. We knew we wanted to go camping, well I did. I love, absolutely LOVE camping! And I really wanted to sleep in a tent and it not just be in our back yard. (How cool is it that we actually have a backyard!) So the requirements for the trip: sleeping in a tent, camping somewhere awesome, and seeing wildlife. I think seeing wildlife is a prerequisite for most adventures we have. And pretty much anywhere is more scenic than here... So we set off with the intention of camping in Stanley, Idaho, which is mostly central Idaho and has a few really big lakes by it. Lakes mean more people, especially for the Fourth, but it also means more wildlife. Plus neither of us have been and it would be fun to see. We were on our way there and Michael says, well we might as well head up to Missoula, Montana and see what's up there.
What a great idea! So we did. We went through Salmon, Idaho going north to Missoula.
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| This is Salmon, Idaho |
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| Still Salmon |
Once we got to Missoula, we wanted to know what Coeur d'Alene, Idaho looked like, so we kept driving.
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| Here is Missoula, Montana, it really is a big place, but I figured I'd get the more scenic view of it. |
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| On the way to Coeur d'Alene |
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| On a side note, we stopped at a rest stop between Missoula and Coeur d'Alene and found some rather friendly ground squirrels. I just so happened to have a whole bag of trail mix and made sure to keep them friendly.... Something about feeling wild animals is just so fun! But I wanted to see if they would eat out of my hand... And I got bit. Dang thing had some really sharp teeth too! |
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| I also saw this Sterling Jay at that rest stop. The only other place I have ever seen these birds was in Yosemite National Park. I was super excited to see this guy! |
Once we got to Coeur d'Alene, which is the most beautiful part of Idaho I'll probably ever see, we looked for a campsite. Our handy GPS couldn't tell us where any campsites were so we drove through the city and stopped at a hotel to ask the locals where to go. Sadly, there isn't any camping in Coeur d'Alene. Seriously. Not a singly campground in the entire city. There were a couple RV parks, but nothing as backwoods as what we wanted. So we drove around some more looking for campsites and found 2 that were about 20 minutes away from the city. One was full, sad. And the other was right off the interstate, stupid, and cost $22 to stay there, not to mention there were a TON of people there and a TON of kids and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten any sleep there. So we didn't even check if there were any open campsites. We left.
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| This isn't quite Coeur d'Alene yet, but almost there. |
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| Coeur d'Alene! |
Michael called his brother Christopher, who so kindly looked up campgrounds for us and confirmed that we found the only 2 that existed anywhere near there. Darn lack of preparation had caught up to us! So we found a National Forest service road and went for a drive on the hunt for a campsite. We figured it's national forest so you can camp anywhere you can find flat enough ground, right? The only thing is, there isn't any flat ground in Coeur d'Alene! We drove for about 40 minutes looking, saw a family of skunks, super cute, some deer, and a really really dark elk. Finally we found the perfect spot. It was too good to be true! No really, it was. We started to set things up and our awesome tent, it really is awesome (no sarcasm involved) has two poles and everything else is just staked into the ground. Michael used the hatchet as a hammer, clever guy, and got the stake about and inch into the ground and hit nothing more than solid rock. Awesome. (that one was sarcastic)
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| This is our almost campsite. Pretty! |
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| It's an elk! |
So we debated on moving the car and strapping the tent to the car somehow or maybe moving the tent to a softer spot or just giving up and leaving altogether. Well, my ideas of strapping the tent to the car were ill-conceived and the ground wasn't any softer anywhere else. So at 9:30 at night we packed it all up and called Christopher again. He's so nice to help us! We knew we weren't going to find a campground anywhere close and it was already dark, so we searched for a Marriott anywhere close so Michael could get us a sweet deal on a room. The closest one ended up being in Spokane, Washington. So we drove there, had a fun time on the crazy, poorly laid out roads in Spokane and finally found the place. Now Michael had already called ahead of time to make sure he could use his discount card and to get an idea of how much the room was going to be. With the discount, it would be about 40 bucks. Not bad right? Especially because Marriotts are pretty dang classy if you ask me. Well it was Fourth of July weekend so the discount didn't work. They block out certain days so they can make more money since they're gonna sell out anyway. The regular room price was not 40 bucks. So we went searching for somewhere cheaper. As it turns out (thank you Lisa Colman for that awesome phrase) Spokane is not a cheap place to stay.... We found a couple places with pretty reasonable rates and chose the least dirty of them to sleep in. The Motel 6 was super fun. . . No free breakfast, super dumb layout, and the lady made us stay on the second floor! Rude. The room was clean, for the most part, but it looked really run down. So I made Michael get the sleeping bags and we slept in those instead of in their blankets. I felt much cleaner. I didn't feel safe enough to take a shower there though, not to mention they didn't give you any free soaps or anything! That's like the best part of staying at a hotel. And we were planning on camping the whole time and didn't bring any of those things anyway. So we didn't shower, don't judge us! But we did watch the women's national hot dog eating championship! It's kind of a big deal I guess. We were going to watch the men's championship, but they took way too long introducing all 10 competitors and I really wanted to explore Spokane. So we walked around the city and saw the waterfalls and were on our way.
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Spokane is a huge city! There are 3
universities there and a TON of people! |
Just over the border in Idaho is a town called Post Falls. They had a Cabela's and I really wanted to see all the awesome taxidermy displays. So we stopped and got hassled by this old guy trying to sell us a credit card contract for like 15 minutes. He was so persistent! I learned that elk don't have upper incisors, they just have a dental pad like cows do. How crazy is that?! And there were 5 or 6 wolverines there even though they are like super endangered.
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| Taxidermy is so cool! |
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| Wolverine |
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| Look it's having a baby! Name that movie. |
When we got back on the interstate headed towards Coeur d'Alene again, Michael caught a glimpse of why Post Falls is called Post Falls. So we stopped and got to see this awesome waterfall! And we kept driving. On the way to Washington we kept seeing all these signs for the 50,000 silver piece collection. It looked interesting, and was in Montana, so we stopped. It ended up being this really awesome bar and souvenir shop. And it really did have 50,000 silver coin fifty cent pieces. It was kind of weird though, it had some really different souvenirs. I'm talking like mugs and bracelets and post cards, but also walking canes with swords in them and woven baskets and I dunno, it just seemed like a weird modge podge of very different things.
We decided we were going to camp that night, so we looked for something near Missoula. Nothing was all to close to there so we camped just outside of Clinton, Montana. It was absolutely beautiful. On our handy atlas, there were little triangles that told us there were campsites there. So we drove down this gravel road basically in the middle of know where and passed 3 or 4 campsites until we decided where to camp. One site was called Grizzly Campsite and it sounded quite adventurous, but that's what everyone else thought too and it was no where near the creek that ran along the road. Then we found Henry's Flat Campground. It was absolutely beautiful. We found a campsite that had a bunch of firewood left in it and nobody was there, so we took it as a contribution to us. And we kept having deer walk around our campsite. There was a bathroom nearby and it was almost right on top of the creek. It was perfect! We had a nice quiet evening of cooking our tinfoil dinners, roasting starburst, and burning marshmallows. It was relaxing and quiet and I loved it! Too bad we couldn't have found that place sooner. Oh well, we added it to our GPS so we can go back to the exact same spot whenever we want. And that was our trip!
We left the Tuesday morning and came back to Rexburg, unpacked, and I went to work while Michael went to a study group. Yep, we sure didn't have a problem getting back into the swing of things with school.
