From Salmon you take a two lane road east until you get to the Teton range. Oh, sure. The road changes names — going under the alias of ID-28 for about 120 miles, then swapping over to ID-33 to allay suspicion. But the fact is, you’re on a two lane road that pretty much goes straight for the better part of 4 hours. You could make a drinking game out of it: down a shot of whisky each time the road bends, and by the time you reach Tetonia, ID, you’d still be stone sober.
The highlight of the trip was Rexburg, ID. Aside from the pants drooping down around the kids ankles, the town looks like it was surgically extracted from the 50s: cute downtown, a central park complete with moms picnicking on the lawn, and a fund raiser dunk tank across the street from where we had lunch.
After we shared a personal cheese pizza from Rexburg’s own 5 Buck Pizza, Molly and I headed over to Porter Park where I’d been lead to believe a carousel might be found. When we lived in Los Gatos, Molly loved riding on the carousel in Porter park. So I thought this would be a great treat. Unfortunately, like a lot of the things on our trip, the carousel was closed for the season. Perhaps it was still running on the weekends, but we weren’t going to hang around to find out. Instead, Molly listened to the monkey portion of her genetic makeup and explored the play structures including this jungle gym.
We also held a couple races to see who was faster. To the victor went the promise of a free ice cream after dinner. I’m just as fond of free ice cream as the next guy, but Molly insisted I wasn’t permitted to win. So the title of fastest person in the park went to Molly.
Much to soon for Molly, it was time to return to the Miata and get back on ID-33 heading east, east, east. We stopped for a few photographs as soon as the Tetons were visible, but there really wasn’t much else in the neighbourhood.
The two-lane road made one more name change (from ID-33 to WY-22) before we made our first actual turn (a left) onto WY-191. Molly and I let out a huge cheer. Of course, we were now driving through downtown Jackson, which might bear further investigation at a later date. But my first impression wasn’t entirely favourable.
At last, we arrived at the Colter Bay cabins and checked into cabin #450. The best thing I can say about cabin #450 is that is it just close enough to the guest lounge to allow 1 to 2 bars of wifi coverage. Otherwise, I’d have preferred a tent. But since Molly is untried in the ways of tenting, cabin was the only way to go.
After dinner, we made our plans for tomorrow, read a bit more from the first book of the Amulet series, and finally Molly crashed.