Idaho, etc.

The thing with traveling is that it is a bit like life: There are fun times and dull times and sometimes when everything is going well, things change and you have problems.  As long as nothing catastrophic happens, the variables just make it interesting.

On Thursday we drove up Interstate 15 from Nevada to the Salt Lake City area.  It’s a road we’ve traveled numerous times before.  It’s a lovely area until hitting the Salt Lake megapolis at Provo.  The road construction through the cities is evidently complete and we sailed along in the four to six lanes of fast traffic.  This section of the trip is just to get from one place to another – we didn’t take the side roads into Zion or the other parks.

Friday we headed north into Idaho.  This, too, is a road we’ve travelled before.  But on this trip we drove northwest out onto the lava plain around Arco and northwest to the tiny town of Mackay to visit Andrea’s brother and his partner.  We had a happy supper with them and some friends at the Bear Bottom Inn.

We spent a lovely, cold, sometimes rainy and windy Saturday with them, seeing some of the surrounding area.  We were fortunate to come while the wildflowers are blooming.

Then today, Sunday, we headed east to Idaho Falls and up the Snake River to Victor and east over Teton Pass to Jackson, Wyoming.  I remember it as a good motorcycle road.  In a car it is more interesting than fun, but still, it was good to spend time off the interstate highway.

Teton Pass is a steep, curvy road over the south end of the Teton Mountains.  We arrived in Jackson with twelve more miles of range than we had at the pass summit despite the twenty miles we’d driven from summit to town – an advantage of an electric car.

It began to rain lightly.  We had lunch, then returned the way we had come, back up and over the pass to Idaho again, and turned north along the west side of the Tetons.  This area is a high, flat plain on the back side of the mountains.  It is usually a lovely drive, but today the clouds lowered, the rain increased, and we saw nothing of the mountains.  We continued north through wonderfully scenic country obscured by increasingly heavy rain and lowered clouds – sometimes low enough to touch the road.

And then, I dropped my Visa card into an inaccessible crevice inside the car’s center console.  Yikes!  Well, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s going to be a hassle – to either take the console apart to retrieve the card or get another one.

So now we’re in West Yellowstone, a town that survives solely on tourists, with a cold rain.  I’m working on my gratitude.  I have so very much to be grateful for, not the least of which is being on a road trip with Andrea.  I needn’t let a few setbacks discourage me.

We aren’t going into the park (Yellowstone) but will continue north tomorrow.  The forecast calls for weather similar to today’s, but it should be nice the next day.  It’s been a fun, interesting, and sometimes a little difficult few days.