Of Families and Mountains

From my beautiful sister’s wedding in a campground near Pocatello, Idaho, to beautiful drives through Yellowstone National Park and the Teton mountains near Jackson, Wyoming, and ending with a family reunion at Bear Lake, we had a busy but enjoyable time during our last week in the USA this trip.

It started with a flight from Seattle. We’d driven down from Vancouver the night before, and had accidentally booked a smoking room in a Travelodge hotel near the airport, and unfortunately, everything else was full, so we did our best to air it out before bed (essential oils on the air conditioner helped a bit), and left as early as we could.

The drive through southwestern Idaho was quite unimpressive, except for a few brown rolling hills, but the campground Ashley and Casey chose for their wedding site was lovely, surrounded by pine trees and with facilities to make for a great event. We enjoyed meeting so much of Casey’s family and friends, and seeing much of my own family again, too.

We stayed at Casey’s parents house for several days and enjoyed the wedding weekend, which included a fun trip to Lava Hot Springs where we played in the pools, soaked in the springs, rafted down the river, and had a nice barbecue.

And the wedding day itself was of course lovely. I was busy helping for much of the day and didn’t take pictures of the ceremony, but it was beautiful to hear the vows they wrote for each other, and feel the love and devotion in the air. I was touched and happy for them.

After the wedding, we drove to Yellowstone through Jackson. Waiting until the last minute to book hotels during the summer, we weren’t left with much choice, and it was difficult to find anything under $300/night that would sleep a family of 5. But the scenery was so unique and beautiful! Striking mountains, shooting geysers, colorful hot springs, wild buffalo, bears, elk, and more. It was a lot of driving, but we had a great time. And I think I took some pretty amazing photos.

We also celebrated Marie’s birthday and she was excited to pick out a bag full of colorful rocks.

After Yellowstone, we were looking forward to going up to Montana to visit the electronics engineer I hired to work on the Groove Piano, and also to take some pictures of the progress with my new camera. But unfortunately, he’s been going through some severe health challenges the past few months, and the day we were going to come up, he found out some very bad news from the doctors which he needed time to process alone with his wife, so unfortunately, we weren’t able to make that trip, so we stayed an extra night in Jackson on the way back down to Bear Lake, and went to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum to see some of the stranger anomalies throughout history.

We ended the trip with a family reunion at Bear Lake with some of the family on Jen’s side, at her Dad’s cabin. The kids had a great time water skiing, and we enjoyed visiting with relatives, relaxing, and eating together.

I’ve posted more pictures below, and a video. Next: The road trip continues in Ireland!