The Continuation.

After a long delay, here is the conclusion to our vacation blog. I know, I know, you've all been waiting on the edge of your seats. We've been house-sitting for Jenny's parents and their Internet is mind-numbingly slow.

After a good nights sleep, we headed to McCall for the 4th of July. We ate lunch at the McCall Brewing Company, a pretty neat brewery with 9 different micro brews on tap. Pretty good food, and the waitress knew a lot about the beers (always a deal breaker for a thumbs up from Dad). Here's a few pics:





Then it was off to Cascade for the fireworks show over Lake Cascade. We ended up sitting right on a little beach about 50 yards from where they were setting off the fireworks. They were exploding right over our heads, it was pretty amazing.

The next day it was 106 degrees at the cabin, so we headed back to Lake Cascade to relax on the beach and do some swimming. The boys came along:

The next day we just hung around the cabin and the day after we headed home to get back to real life.

The Big 4th.

Well, almost a month has gone by since my last post, so I guess it's time to do it again. Jenny and I decided to spend the fourth at her parents cabin in Idaho, about an hour north of Boise in the Long Valley. I had never been there before, so it was off to Idaho on the third. I'll do the first couple of days in the Maggie style of blogging, one post for each day. If I tried to do it all at once, everyone would get bored all at once, instead of getting for over the span of a couple of days.

So here is day one. We awoke at 5 a.m., loaded up everything we hadn't packed the night before and headed off. We decided to go through Yellowstone as it would cut some time off of the trip and I never pass up a chance to go through the park. We saw the usual animals, elk, buffalo, and pelicans. Jenny was on the lookout for a moose (she had never seen one in the wild) and finally was rewarded with a cow and 2 calves. We didn't really want to disturb them so we didn't really get close enough for a good picture.

Once outside of the park, we started passing billboards for something called Bear World outside of Rexburg, ID. Jenny was excited to go and with much argument convinced me to stop there. I didn't really know what to expect, having never heard of this place. We were amazed when we arrived to find a sort of Yellowstone safari. The first part you drive through the hoofed animal tour, complete with buffalo, elk, mountain goats, and caribou. Then, much like in Jurassic Park, we were granted access through the electric gate and into the bear sanctuary. I can only let the pictures tell the story and all I can say is that none of these have been enlarged, this is how close you get to the bears.










There are a lot more pictures, Jenny is scrap booking the trip, so I'll have it at the party for those of you that would like to see more. We spent about an hour at Bear World and I would highly recommend it to anybody traveling in that area.

That was about all of the excitement for that day, we drove for about another 5 hours and made it to the cabin right as it was getting dark. After sitting quietly for the whole day. . .



the boys relaxed and got ready for the 4th of July.