idaho

If you can’t tell from the awesome title, we made it to our planned destination of Twin Falls, Idaho. We planned for an ambitious 8 hour 45 minutes drive for the day. It was a very long drive but had a lot of great scereny. And it all started very abruptly as soon as you left the off ramp from Portland. We went from city to wilderness in about 20 feet. That was pretty cool. We stayed in Pacific Northwest foresty type of terrain for quite a while before it turned into sort of grasslands, then back to forest when we hit the rockies. After the rockies, we had more grasslands very similar to Alberta. This continued into Idaho for a little bit until it all of a sudden turned more deserty. And then there is the canyon. Twin Falls has a canyon. It’s pretty cool!

The interstate we took went right along the Columbia river and we took the Lewis and Clark trail! We both that was really neat, taking the same route that they did when they were going east and exploring the area.

This route took us through a lot of little towns; one of which was a town we were thinking of staying in if we wanted to not stop in Portland the night before called The Dalles. I am quite glad we did not stay there because the town smelled strongly of moth balls. Yah, moth balls. Not, like stinky smelting or fish or other factory smells, but moth balls. WTF The Dalles? So, we happily passed through that town and continued on. After Stink Town came another one we contemplated staying in and again, we were glad we didn’t stay. It was the most depressing town ever. The main attraction, I think, was the correctional facility that was right beside a highschool. We stopped for gas and circled around for food but decided to go somewhere else because everything looked really gross.
After Depressing Town, we started hitting the mountain pass. We expected it to be really high elevation and take a while but it didn’t take that long at all.

It was snowing so it was kinda slow going for about an hour but we started going downhill again and soon we were on unsnowy roads. This is when we hit the grasslands turning desert terrain that is Idaho (and a couple hours of the end of Oregon). It is a straight flat boring drive that got old pretty fast so we put on our audiobook for the first time this trip. There was still about 4 and a half 5 hours to go and we needed something that was more interesting.

I have so say, though Idaho may have boring landscape, it has amazing rest area bathrooms at rest stops along the interstate. They are SUPER clean and aren’t smelly and some even have music. One had wifi, which we used to book our hotel in Twin Falls.
One of the rest areas we stopped at in Oregon had signs that told us to watch out for rattle snakes and poison oak…we didn’t stay there long.
Apparently, there aren’t as many lunch places to stop along the interstate or in many towns along the way so we went to McDonalds, Again. I was excited to try sweet tea, which they have there. I can say that my curiosity has been satisfied and both of us are certain we will not get it again. Ever. It tasts like it’s about 1/3 sugar. I took one sip and that was enough. I couldn’t drink any more, it was that sweet. Tyler tried it and agreed that it was about the most disgusting drink he’s ever had. SO. GROSS.

This was a tree farm that we thought was silly with the change of colour from white to brown all the same. Shut up it was a long drive and we had to entertain ourselves somehow ok?

We arrived in Twin Falls, Idaho around 6pm and went out to see the canyon because it was about a 3 minute walk from the hotel.