Falling into Idaho

As we explained earlier, to reach this state in our car explorations, we had to climb the steeply high
Teton Pass and fight gravity coming down the west side. Fortunately, we found a slightly more circuitous route. 

US-26 follows the Snake River on the flanks of other, less tall, mountains and passes through some just-beautiful country to boot.

The Freightliner repair shop (Tiffin coaches are built on Freightliner frames) was friendly and kind and even had three paved and nearly flat RV parking spaces at the rear of their huge parking lot complete with 50 amp electrical service.  Since we didn't require any wet services, they said, “No problem,” and we camped there several days all by ourselves while they worked us into their schedule, corrected John's ignorant diagnosis of the leaking fluid, ordered a new water pump shipped, installed it and the new hoses for the heater core, not the power steering. Forty feet in front of the engine that makes that heat, this device warms the toes of the driver and co-pilot in cold weather. (The “house furnace” is a different system entirely.)  So it was not as critical a problem as we had thought at first.  And what's another wad of cash down the money pit?  Especially as it included repairing a noxious, dangerous exhaust leak under the bedroom.

So we explored in our Honda, freed of its towing leash, to find Idaho Falls' falls thoroughly tamed and harnessed for power. John found it interesting that this town had

made riverside walkways and parks as Grand Rapids, but has not yet evolved the GR plan to put the rapids back (undoing all the 19^th Century work of knocking the top off Heritage Hill; we guess the great-grand-parents of today's athletic younger people didn't think to have fun shooting the hydraulics in sturdy plastic kayaks.

On the advice of one Freightliner service tech here in Idaho, we toured north to the town of Heise,

just across the Snake River at the edge of those mountains, to eat “the very best pizza in the world” (his words). It was good, but we think we may have tasted better. As our GPS track shows on the topographic map, the Snake River provided a very, very distinct transition from those higher elevations to the many square miles of flat rolling hay and potato farms to the south. We drove a touristy sight-seeing route, wishing we'd seen the actual potato plants. John doesn't know if their blooms are pretty or not, but Prussia's Frederick the Great thought so a few hundred years ago; when potatoes were brought back from the New World, “he forced his subjects to grow them.”

We learned that, the next day, after traveling 30-miles to Blackfoot, ID, to the Idaho Potato Museum where the Official Greeting is shown here.  

And you envied our fun last month at “The World's Only Corn Palace!”

Nearly everybody's heard of Idaho Potatoes, thanks to a very focused and highly creative series of advertising campaigns. (Your Mr. Potato wasn't just an

innocent childhood toy!) In this context, Russet potatoes really have no other name; it's either an Idaho Potato or it's just a tuber. Seriously. “No other growing area has greater name recognition than Idaho Potatoes.” (82% worldwide!)

The museum charged 11-bucks (senior rate) for the two of us to learn that

datum, see the tools used by long-ago tater growers and today's tater farmers, be exposed to comic books that promoted Idaho Potatoes, and many, many other factoids.....

....such as How To Make Your Own Potato Gun (under a more politically correct name) and even an electric clock powered by a potato! (Actually, that last one is pretty much old-hat for grade schoolers ever since the low power digital clock chips appeared; the potato generator technology also is featured in the computer game Portal II.)

We reluctantly left the excitement in what used to be Blackfoot's Union Pacific train station to return to our coach and find the techs needed yet another day. Okay. We found a scenic drive north of Heise, starting in Ashton, ID, which bills itself on the road into the town as “The Seed Potato Capital Of The World.” This unexpected trip extension just keeps getting cooler and cooler! More vast potato fields east of Ashton and

Marysville, transitioning to craggy mountainous terrain along the Mesa Falls Scenic Byway. It runs past Idaho's First Ski Resort at Bear Gulch (now defunct) and allowed us to have lunch at the only falls in the entire state not employed for irrigation or hydroelectric power --or so the sign claims.

Freightliner interrupted our exciting education (both of us consider this unexpected Idaho visit to be one of the more memorable highlights of our entire trip!) to say the coach is done. It's a Friday afternoon. We arrived there just before closing time to pay the bill and received permission to continue the parking lot campout since they were closed for the weekend. We had laundry and shopping and minor housekeeping that kept us busy.

We had missed seeing the Craters of the Moon National Monument in last year's trip and wanted to check it out this year, since discovering we're close. That's next.