Summer Trip Day 5: Boise, ID to Provo, UT

Today was supposed to be a ‘long haul day’.  Meaning it was 5+ hours of driving.  Fortunately, it turned out to be a really nice day for the most part with multiple cool stops.  Knowing it was going to be long drive, we headed out of my cousin’s house around 7am and decided to find breakfast on the road.  I told Olivia to start looking for places (using her cell phone & Yelp) to research places to stop.  The idea was for a relatively quick stop someplace where we could order and the take off.  It also got her practicing her researching skills so she could be part of the process for finding places to go.  

We ended up (accidentally) at a doughnut shop in Mountain Home, ID.  Yes, that is the actual name of the town.  She found a good Yelp review for a bakery off the highway so we decided to check it out.  We got there right before 9am, but no one was home so we decided to walk around town a bit and came across this little doughnut shop with fresh baked doughnuts.  The owner had been open about 2 years so far so I asked her what her favorite was.  I choose one of her recommendations of a blueberry doughnut which actually had fresh blueberries in it!  She told us to walk in the alleyway behind the store, because a bunch of local artists had painted the back walls of stores all the way down the street.  So we had a pleasant walk back to the car via this empty alleyway with beautiful murals along each building.  It’s pretty cool to discover hidden gems like this in small towns, but they’re there if you look for them!

We got back on the road and decided to stop in Burley, ID where I had spent some time back in 1998 when I worked on the Wildlife Management Area (WMA) after graduating from college.  It took me about 30 minutes to drive into Burley from the WMA and it was the closest town for getting supplies.  One of my favorite stores was CAL Ranch which is basically a farming store which has a little bit of everything and catered to country living.  I love this store!  We shopped around and we only ended up getting a huge bottle of Sarsaparilla (i.e close to root beer).  It was still fun to reminisce.    

I gave Olivia the task to figure out where we would be around lunch time so that we could find a place to stop.  We took almost stopped at the Golden Spike which indicated where the Eastbound and Westbound railroads met, but it was 22 miles off of the highway and we needed to keep chugging.  We ended up at this small park in Bothwell, UT (oddly named Bothwell Park) which featured a six basket frisbee golf course.  

After a meal of grilled cheese sandwiches, Drew and I played a few baskets of frisbee golf (for whatever reason, I had brought a couple of sets of frisbee golf discs because I’m prepared).  Olivia was especially proud of her navigation skills because she kept asking me, “This is a pretty nice park isn’t it, Dad?”

We toyed with the idea of going to a museum in SLC, but figured it would be cost prohibitive (i.e. spendy + time intensive).  I decided that we were going to go Great Salt Lake.  Back in 1986 my parents had an idea of stopping at the lake to take a dip.  There is so much salt in the lake that you can actually float on the water!  Unfortunately, we never stopped as I was recovering from major scrapes from falling from my bike in South Lake Tahoe.  The salt might not have felt so good on those wounds, I suppose.  This was my chance to float in the Great Salt Lake!  Olivia got us to Antelope Island State Park.  We arrived at the visitor’s center and walked around to get out of the heat as the temperature was up to about 90 degrees at this point.  Hot!  The beach was right around the corner so we ventured down and walked about an 1/8^th of mile across sand/rocks/salt to get to the water’s edge.  Drew and I ventured in and the water was filled with these very small, translucent red shrimp in the water.

Kinda gross, but we managed to lay down in the salty, warm water and float.  To be really honest, I floated way easier than Drew mainly due to body fat content. 

By the time we got out of Ogden it was rush hour and we got caught in three – let me repeat this – three cities of rush hour traffic.  We had to drive through Ogden, Salt Lake City, and Provo traffic to get to our campground.  I think I did fairly well with only uttering 2-3 curse words during the entire drive!  Chalk one up for dad!

All in all, a pretty adventurous day which was supposed to only be a ‘long haul day’.