We're back

We toyed for a bit with the idea of driving from Idaho to Devils Tower (no, there is no apostrophe, and yes, it bugs me, too) and then up through South Dakota, but it would have taken a long time and our boys have a trip early Monday morning. So instead, we drove straight back to North Dakota, which is 1000 miles. In one day. Yes, we are insane, but the kids handled it pretty well. And now we are digging ourselves out and trying to remember how this town works. When you've lived somewhere less than a year and then leave for nearly six weeks, you start to forget basic things about it.

The time away was WONDERFUL. We camped in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We saw friends in Lancaster, CA, visited family in Santa Barbara, CA, and saw fireworks and went to the beach and went bouldering. My husband went to the UK for ten days for a pair of professional conferences. My 5YO played Legos with his same-aged cousin, and they and the next-younger cousin took swimming lessons together. We went up to Utah after that and saw my sister and the kids filled up playing with those cousins. We took walks and played at the park and went to a couple of museums at BYU and even stopped to sing a song in the wonderfully echoey tunnel. We went up to where we used to live in Idaho and played with my SIL's little neighbors (who were lying in wait for us and kept coming to the the door to play with our kids). We swam in her pool and went to the temple and visited our old church congregation (two days before they had a massive flood that they are still rebuilding from). We saw friends from grad school who live there now, and my kid got to see their old friends. I got to meet Sarah Williams, who I've known cyberly for YEARS--not to mention all the places we've been at the same time, only not quite at the same place. And we watched quite a few world cup games. YAY DEUTSCHLAND!!

Then we went up to Teton Valley (Idaho/Wyoming border) and floated down the Teton River with second cousins, visited with my 98YO grandmother-in-law, let all the kids play with the rest of their cousins, hiked to the waterfall in Darby Canyon, and climbed Table Rock (11,000 feet). We also spent a day swimming at String Lake in Grand Teton National Park. It was SO NICE. The only people we didn't get to see were my parents, who live in Arkansas. We all really needed time to spend with our relatives, to be at a higher altitude, to smell lodgepole pines, and to fill up on mountains and nature. I apparently have a mental/physical need to visit mountains every now and then, and I was getting pretty low, and needed a fix. :)

On the way out we drove through part of Yellowstone (on the 191), and saw a moose drinking from a stream, and also a grizzly bear strolling along! Later on, in North Dakota, we saw a coyote cross all four lanes of the interstate. And then near Fargo, we saw the most spectacular lightning show I've seen.

Now we're back to 3/4 of a house and 3/4 of a job, but at least we had a chance to fill up some of the holes and get some mental nourishment while we were gone. And our house actually wasn't a thousand degrees when we came back, and the dehumidfier went back on after the power was off in town here, so the basement isn't moldy (er, any more than usual, I mean), and mostly it just smells like Extremely Old House and not Floody Mold (like our old neighborhood--yikes!!! People we know in Rexburg had water fill their basements and burst out the windows, and in our neighborhood itself, the city sewer pump was overwhelmed and half the houses have sewage backed up in their houses. Not sure if it was just water or also sewage at our old house, but ewww!)

I'll put up some pictures when I get a chance, but right now we have no food in the house and we need to stop eating the snack food.