Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Day 76

It's almost impossible to pick one happy thing from today because the entire day was pretty great! This morning we got up and made the two hour drive into the mountains to the beautiful little town we're straying in for the next few days.

I found an awesome vacation rental online and it's the perfect place for us to hang out for a few days. I love it up here. We're right on the border of Idaho and Wyoming. The drive up here is just breathtaking. I've been here many times in my life and it never gets old. Seeing the mountains and the trees and the rivers and the wildflowers just makes me happy. Every time we drive up here I ooh and ahh like it's fireworks on the 4th of July.

So on our way here we made our traditional stop in a tiny little middle of nowhere town for square ice cream. Decades ago someone at a little convience store in a tiny little town acquired a square ice cream scoop and decided to start selling square ice cream cones. It's kind of silly really. It's just regular ice cream, but they scoop it in a square scoop and put in in a cone. There is nothing that special about it, but it became an amusing novelty over the years and now people come from far and wide for square ice cream. They keep a sign on the wall of how many people they serve each year, and specifically over the 4th of July weekend each year, when the place is usually packed. I noticed today the sign said that last 4th of July weekend they sold over 15,000 scoops. In one weekend! In a town that seriously must have like 20 people in it, lol. Every time we drove up to the mountains as a kid we would stop and get square ice cream and now I do the same with my kids.

So we stopped this morning for our square ice cream. It was actually freezing cold outside and had been raining, and we ended up eating our ice cream in the car with her heater on. But I was not going to miss the opportunity to eat square ice cream, even if it was really too cold to really enjoy the experience! We had fun anyway, and it made me super happy.




After we at our ice cream we finished our journey to the place we're staying. When we pulled into town it started SNOWING for a minute. Snowing. It snowed on our summer vacation. Welcome to the Tetons. :)

That was actually fine with us because the place we're staying is awesome and we decided it would be fun to spend the first afternoon just hanging out here. The weather is supposed to warm up for the rest of the week, so today was a good day to just relax. We ended up picking up a pizza and watching The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty. We hadn't seen it before. I feel like that movie almost needs it's own blog post. I LOVED it! That movie was profound to me. It had a really beautiful message. We watched the movie and then had a great discussion with our kids about what you can learn from that movie. 

Being up in the mountains that I love so much and spending time with the kids and watching a really profoundly beautiful movie...it was all just kind of an awesome day. I wish that we could stay longer. We'll be here until Saturday morning and then we're going back to my moms house for a couple of days to say our goodbyes. I'm trying not to think about the goodbyes. This little side trip is a good distraction. 

Tomorrow I think the boys are going to go on a hike. When I was a teenager I went to church girls camp in this area and we took a really beautiful five mile hike one day that has stuck with me all these years. It's a memory I look back on fondly. I really want the boys to experience the same hike. The whole family would do it but I'm not sure that Clarissa could do a hike that long, and I don't want to get halfway through it and decide that she can't. So I'm going to hang out with Clarissa and Shawn is going to take the boys. We'll come back here again sometime and do it with the whole family. 

We have other fun things planned for the few days we'll be here. We're kind of playing it by ear based on the weather, but I think we have some fun activities to look forward to!

But now I'm going to go to bed, because this very fun day has also been exhausting. I need to rest up for more adventures to come! 

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