Land of the potatoes

Today's view:


Today, we woke up and drove to a laundromat in American Fork, Utah to re-wash/dry our clothes that were not finished by the terrible, crappy hotel dryer. At the laundromat, the owner's 3 or 4 year old son was a holy terror, ripping the couch cushions off the couch and jumping on them, pushing the laundry baskets around into people, and randomly coming up to Robbie, screaming and throwing things at him. Everyone in the laundromat looked miserable, and this experience re-affirmed our necessity for an apartment with its own washer and dryer in Corvallis.

After laundry time, we went to breakfast and hit the road. We heard from our local tour guide, Jen's friend Stephanie, who grew up and went to college near where we were staying. We lost cell service, but we got a few suggestions for things to see. We went to a cave near American Fork, but we were told it would be a few hours to wait for a ranger-guided tour (and you weren't allowed to tour by yourself). We decided that would be too long to wait, so we just decided to make it a scenic side trip and head back to the highway. We wanted to see the Great Salt Lake, which we did, if only from a distance:



Our GPS helped us to navigate up to Idaho Falls, where we are staying for the night. Our GPS has been a bit grumpy lately, leading us to abandoned buildings that are supposed to be post offices and ignoring state parks right across the road from us. We have determined that Tommy (our name for our TomTom GPS) will also occasionally give us directions that are not entirely helpful, such as: "Turn right in 350 meters." I know that we probably should have converted to the metric system by now, and I know that a yard is approximately a meter, but when you are driving it is very difficult to know exactly how far 350 meters is. Jen can picture herself swimming in a long course pool (50 meters), but that's about it as far as accurate comparisons. We have gotten a kick out of mimicking our GPS voice, saying equally un-helpful things such as, "Turn left in 3600 decimeters," or "Make a U-turn in 450,000 millimeters."

We have also been experiencing an ongoing battle with Robbie's visor. It will not hold itself up to the ceiling, and despite Jen's pleading for him to spend the stupid $80 to fix it before we take 30-day residence in the car, he was stubborn and would not get it fixed. We have since developed new, intricate methods of adhering the visor to the ceiling, typically involving anchoring various corners of the visor to sturdy plastic parts of the car using masking tape.

Robbie's Visor Battle:

Giving the visor the stink eye:


We eventually made our way into the great Potato State, even passing a "Potato museum" at one exit. We are now officially in a state that shares a border with our destination state! There are starting to be more and more trees, the evenings are getting cooler, the people care less and less about what they are wearing, and the grass is getting softer. All good things in our book.

Robbie laying on the soft grass near the Snake River in Idaho Falls. You can see the Idaho Falls LDS temple in the background:


Tomorrow morning, we are going to the Grand Tetons, then heading to West Yellowstone to camp for a few days. The lows in West Yellowstone are going to be in the 40s at night.

Today's route:

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