1st August, 2017

Right, here we go again, desperately trying to catch up, so excuse me if this one is a bit light on text, but I am hoping the pics will do the talking.

First up, let me fill you in with the tale of our Dodge Grand Caravan and in particular, its front right tyre. The clever technology had informed us that this part of the vehicle was a little low on air, so we filled it up a couple of times on our travels – not as straightforward as it might seem as the air pump things over here don’t seem to have a built-in gauge to tell you when to stop, so it was a case of putting some in and seeing what the onboard readout said. Anyway, it seemed to be going down rather more often than it did before, so we filled it up again the night before on the way back from the Thai restaurant, but come the morning it was really low, so we had to do something else. So our first job was to contact Enterprise Car Rentals at Hailey Airport about 5 miles up the road, who directed us to Les Schwarb Tires. There was a bit of a wait, but that gave us a chance to have an excellent breakfast just down the road al fresco.

All was well and we were soon on our way out of Hailey (birthplace of Ezra Pound, by the way) and heading for our big stop of the day, the Craters of the Moon National Monument. This is just a bit west of Idaho Falls and is a large and rather incongruous area of land (83 sq miles) that was the subject of a great deal of volcanic activity 15,000 and 2,000 thousand years ago.  There are lava flows, cinder cones, lava tubes and spatter cones aplenty with black basalt everywhere. The temperature the shade was pushing 39 degrees, so it was a warm visit to say the least. The good news is that you can drive the 7 mile loop road and then nip out for a quick view of some of the sights.

Our first stop was to see the North Crater Flow Trail, a nice short one that gave you an excellent taste of what the area was about. The rocks look a little bit like enormous elephant droppings, as I hope you can see from the photos.

Next it was up the Inferno Cone (great name), a stiff walk in the heat, but worth it for the view from the top. Note the panorama one with two Nicks!

Our final stop were the caves formed by the lava tubes, due to the sides and top hardening faster than the flow beneath, thus forming a cave. There were a selection to explore,  but we chose the Indian Cave, which was the most accessible. A bit of a walk to get there (half a mile there and half a mile back) and a bit of a scramble once inside, but definitely worth it. The colours were astonishing and it was wonderfully cool and even had a resident pigeon.

Warm work, but a fascinating experience. We headed west for our overnight at our AirBnb in Rexburg at the Raspberry Garden, which was a well appointed apartment with some of the highest beds we have ever seen. It must have been about four feet off the ground and was so high that Val, having gone to the loo in the night, could not get back into bed and had to wake me up to pull her up the side. We then collapsed in a fit of the giggles to the extent that the kids woke up. It was funny though!

We were now finally able to do some washing, much needed and while one of the loads spun round we headed for a so so supper at an Applebee’s. It did the trick and was nice and quick which meant we could have a game of Crazy Whist in which Caroline excelled herself by not only winning, but by predicting correctly every single hand. An amazing feat.

Ok, that still came out quite long. I will try to do more tomorrow as we venture into the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone!