Idaho vacation

Chad and I went to see my family in Idaho for a week this summer. It was so much fun, we wish we had planned to stay quite a bit longer. We went whitewater rafting, camping, four-wheeling, hiking, played at the park, watched movies, went to our favorite restaurant (Texas Road House), and just hung out. Here's a little more about our trip. We can't wait to go again! I love Idaho. There is so much to do there (and of course there's family). Hopefully we will live there someday.

We went camping in the mountains for 2 days and 1 night. Our campsite was great - private, gorgeous, along a stream, and close to the reservoir so we could swim.


Chad had a lot of fun collecting wood for our fire. It looks like he is collecting wood for a few days, but really he was collecting wood for just one more fire before we left. lol. He just kept finding "good" pieces of wood he couldn't leave behind. As he drove the wood down the hill to the campground, most of it fell off - of course, but we still had enough for a great campfire! Thanks Chad!

Chad did some open water swimming practice in the reservoir. He went about a mile. It was pretty cold!

We made yummy s'mores with reeses in the middle.

My parents made lots of amazing food in the dutch oven - potatoes, pork, chicken, and dessert. We ate so well on this camping trip! We roasted some of the chicken over the fire like hot dogs. It was amazing! I'm definitely doing that next time I go camping. Chad and I don't even eat this good at home. Thanks mom! In the background of this picture you can see us playing cards. We played a lot of scum while we relaxed around the campfire.

Chad made a "refrigerator" in the stream by our campground by making a circle of rocks. We kept our watermelon and drinks cold in there the whole time. The stream was also very convenient for washing all of our dishes. There is supposed to be real gold flecks in this stream too, but I never found any. I guess the plastic kitchen spoon I used to "pan" for gold just wasn't good enough.

Mom, Cara, and I cooking dinner.

We had a lot of fun four-wheeling for several hours on our trip as well. The scenery on the trails was gorgeous!

Our next (or actually first) fun adventure in Idaho was white water rafting. We did a 17-mile raft trip. The first 1 1/2 hours of it is pretty calm, so we relaxed, enjoyed the weather, and ate lunch on the raft. During the next two hours on the river there are a lot more rapids. The big rapids are my favorite. The biggest on this river are class 4. Chad doesn't like the rapids where you could fall out any second. He prefers the ones just a little smaller - big enough to be a lot of fun and challenging to get through, but small enough you probably won't fall out. I prefer the adrenaline rush from the bigger, riskier rapids. In fact, on some of the rapids, I liked to try going through them standing up to "up" the risk. Luckily, this river has both kinds of rapids.

Here's most of our group.

Scott and Dad

Chad was the only one willing to brave the freezing water and jump in during the calm parts of the float trip. Luckily, no one ever fell in.

Later in the week we hiked to a waterfall my family found basically in the middle of nowhere. It was gorgeous! The waterfall was pretty powerful, so when I was walking toward it and then standing behind it I got soaked - even from about 10 feet back.

To hike to the falls you had to hike down a cliff that pretty much goes straight down. This picture is taken from an angle, so you can't tell how steep it is, but trust me - it's steep! When we were at the top and my dad said this is where we would be hiking down I seriously thought he was kidding. It looked impossible to "hike" down instead of fall or slide down it. Actually, in order to get down we had to do a little of both. I kept sliding down so I had to hold my dad's hand as he led me down. We both slid a few times and had to catch each other. It was a challenging climb, but it was well worth it. The waterfall was gorgeous!

Here is the waterfall from a distance. It's at the back left of the picture.

Here are more waterfall pictures. Chad is crossing a log about 10 feet over the river in order to get back to the car. The bottom two pictures are of us behind the waterfall.