It's not lost on me that one of the reasons I am able to take a two week vacation to visit my birth family and then my daughter and her amazing family is because my birth mom chose adoption for me and I chose adoption for my daughter. Let's continue!
Sarah and I would love to be official drivers for Kia and produce marketing material of how well that little car can venture all over the world. Have your people call our people!
Above is a picture of our little kia in the badlands, I'll get to those stories later.
We were smart in preordering stroop waffles for breakfast, dehydrated mountain house meals, chi protein coffee, and protein packs and having them delivered to my aunt's house.
Obviously you are not allowed to fly with fuel, but I brought my Jet Boil and figured we could buy fuel once we got closer to the SawTooths. WRONG! Because they had been in the area of totality for the Eclipse, they were out of everything. Including fuel for the next two weeks.
Thankfully Sarah made friends with some folks at our campground at Alturas Lake. The Joneses. They even offered to make us some coffee in the morning. Mrs. Jones was really knowledgeable about local tribes and their history.
We just relaxed the rest of the day and swam in the glacial cold waters of Alturas Lake and made ourselves at home on an old dried out log and spent the late afternoon reading.
Sarah in Alturas Lake, Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho
(Home sweet home!)
We ended up across from this beautiful little stream which had recently spawned a lot of Salmon. The water was crystal clear!
We left the rain fly off for the night and I woke up in the middle of the night and sat straight up amazed by the stars. I accidentally freaked Sarah out by doing that, but I'm glad we had the opportunity to look at the stars together.
The next day we visited with the Joneses for a bit, took them up on their offer for coffee. They were very knowledgeable and passionate about their coffee. If I was much of a coffee drinker, I would have been sold on whatever they were drinking!
We decided to go on Bridal Veil Falls Hike. 4 miles in and 4 miles back with some moderate elevation changes but nothing too crazy. I was still really sick but was determined not to miss out on this experience or cause Sarah to miss out on these incredible views.
Stanley Lake
If I have the opportunity to do it again, I would probably want to camp at Stanley Lake.. look at that view! We knew most of the North West was on fire but were a little worried when firemen parked in the lot as we were putting on our boots. Sarah asked if we should be worried. The response of, "meh" is not very helpful. They explained they were going to check on a fire that should be completely contained if not out. Sarah told them if something goes wrong we are up there!
So the Bridal Veil Falls description said it was 4 miles in, we got to the four mile point and found a beautiful place to have lunch where a rock bed came together between converging streams. We asked another couple how far we were from the falls. He pointed wayyyyyy up into the mountains.
There was no way we were getting there. Well played mother nature. Well played.
After our hike we drove from the Sawtooth Mountains to Lewiston, Idaho to see my birth mom Erica.
There was a combos incident of 2017. Sarah got bit by a tick and is now allergic to mammal meat. She accidentally bought the pepperoni combos. Thankfully mid chew she immediately spit them out and asked me to read the ingredients. "Beef fat." She tossed the bag of combos over to me, though admittedly I felt guilty eating them in front of her and they sat the majority of the trip in the passenger door.
We have a few incidents of 2017, one of which is the Panera incident where we ended up at completely separate locations looking for the other while saying, "I'm here! Where are you?" So far we've avoided repeating that!
By the way... Sarah is hilarious and so genuine. She has a fabulous blog. Check her out at: http://www.thedepressedhiker.com/
Her perspectives of our journey will be published this fall, she has a wonderful queue of posts lined up to post automatically, she's much better at this blogging thing than I am!
Next post: Spending time in Lewiston with my birth mom :)
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