Bear Lake Trip - Day 4 - Traveling again

We woke up to a whole bunch of seagulls screaming on the morning of July 3rd. They sounded like little girls screaming. But it was seagulls. Derrick was the first of the kids to wake up. He went outside and sat with Brandon for a while. They watched the seagulls fight over food that had been left out at other campsites. Brandon told Derrick, "See how they are at every campsite except for ours?  That's because everyone else left food out. That's why we always put our food away in the car."

Breakfast was supposed be pancakes, but we realized we forgot to pack syrup. So instead we had instant oatmeal and hot chocolate and assorted snacks and leftovers. 

I went in the tent and started getting sleeping bags rolled up and letting the air out of the air mattresses. Brandon started cleaning up the outside stuff. 

The kids were really good helpers. They helped take things to the car and helped take down the tent and canopy. I'm not sure why I took this picture, but here's our car. Our campsite was about 100 feet behind it. And you can see the water beyond the trees. 

Here's the car all packed up. I'd thought we'd have more room after three days of eating through our stuff. But somehow there was less room. Part of the problem was that the big food bag had become the laundry bag and most of the suitcases were nearly empty. But I'd get all that figured out at the hotel. 

Veronica has the uncanny ability to put on a hat and become a completely different version of herself. I did a double take when I saw her sitting in the car. 

Before we left I wanted to go down to the water one last time. Charlotte and Veronica came with me. (The other's had already been down to the water earlier.)

This trip had been a dream come true. I'm so glad we made it happen. 

Here I am.

Charlotte saw a crawdad in the water. 

You can kind of see it's shape.

Here are Charlotte and Veronica. 

As we drove away Derrick said, "Bye Bear Lake. We'll be back again soon."  We'd already decided that we wanted to come back every year or at the very least every other year. 

Our destination for the day was Pocatello, but we couldn't check into our hotel until 3:00 so we needed something to do during the morning. So we decided to head East into Wyoming and visit Fossil Butte National Monument before heading northwest to Pocatello. 

This was our third visit to Fossil Butte. I was impressed at how green everything was. We've been there in May and August and I don't think the vegetation was ever this green those times. 

There was a nice walkway up to the visitor center. It had a timeline of earth history.

We liked this display showing what the fossil quary looked like. 

Inside the visitor center there was a cool screen that showed prehistoric fish swimming around when you touched their fossil.

I always love this wall of plant fossils.

The kids were really interested in everything. 

The bathroom even had a display of different kinds of fossilized poop.

Here's a view from the porch.

And one with the kids. 

We've never done the scenic drive beyond the visitor center before. We decided to do that today. The drive was really pretty.

I was getting all sorts of inspiration for the native garden I want to do at the back of our yard. 

We finished the scenic drive and then started heading toward Pocatello. We stopped at a park in Soda Springs so everyone could get some wiggles out. 

Then we drove on to Pocatello. We arrived around 2:30 and since we couldn't check into our hotel until 3:00 we decided it was a good idea to go to Winco and pick up something to eat. We had plans for dinner that night, but we needed something for a mid afternoon lunch/snack. Veronica had the briliant idea to do microwave mini pizzas on english muffins. 

Derrick and I went into Winco and found the ingredients for the pizzas. We ran into a bit of trouble finding the pepperoni. I was vaugly remembering that the pepperoni was always somewhere kind of weird in that store. While I was trying to remember where that spot was exactly Derrick just went up to an employee and said, "Excuse me, where is the pepperoni?" And was directed right to the pepperoni. Good job Derrick. 

Then we drove up to the hotel. And I do mean UP. We were staying at the Holiday Inn Express which is high up on the East side of the hills above Pocatello. The kids were so excited that we were staying at the hotel at the top of the road. 

We were hoping for a room with a view of the valley, but we were on the backside of the hotel.  And I'd been under the impression we were staying in a "suite." The pictures made it seem like we'd have at least one separate room. But instead we were in one big room with two beds and a pull out couch. But honestly, NONE of that mattered because we had WALLS, and AIR CONDITIONING, and TV, and ELECTRICITY, and a SHOWER. 

Everyone took turns making their mini pizza. 

Brandon found the laundry room and took our swim suits there to get washed. I went through the dirty laundry and put together a load that would give us all enough clean cloths to make it through the rest of the trip. We all took baths. And we all relaxed. It was nice to just sit and enjoy an indoor space.  

After about 3 hours of relaxing in the hotel we decided it was time to go get dinner. We drove over to the Ross Park Drive In. This is a little tiny out door restaurant. It doesn't look like much, but this place is legendary in Pocatello. The food is so good that this is where Brandon and I ate to celebrate our anniversary both years we lived in Pocatello. 

Brandon waited in line and then placed our order. The kids and I went and waited in the shade on some tables off to the side. When a table near the front of the property opened up we moved over there. 

Here we are waiting for the food.

Me and Brandon.

All of us with our food. 

It was delicious. 

We weren't really interested in doing anything else outside so we went back to the hotel. I took this picture of the view from the breakfast room.

It was a very fancy room. 

Everyone changed into swimming suits and we went down the hall to the pool. I told the kids to walk, but they were basically running when I took this picture. 

Here's the pool. (There's some extra kids in there.) My kids may have been done swimming at Bear Lake the day before, but they are NEVER sick of swimming. They were all happy to jump in the water. 

I tried going in but it was too cold. Then i tried going in the hot tub, but it made my sun burned legs BURN. 

Here's Brandon playing with the kids. 

Lydia. 

More pool pictures - I don't know why I took so many.

Here I am hanging out in a chair. Later Charlotte and Lydia showed me that I could get into the hot tub if i did it slowly and let me body get used to it. I loved that hot tub!

Here's a video of the kids jumping into the pool. 

Around 9:00 we went back to the hotel room. We ran into a bit of a problem with the bed situation. I'd assumed Derrick and Veronica would share the pull out bed. But Veronica didn't want to share. So I went to the front desk and asked for a roll away bed. But I was told they didn't have any because the rooms were too small. 

No one was willing to share with Derrick, but Lydia was willing to sleep on an air mattress by herself. So Brandon and I went out to the car and blew up an air mattress with the car outlet pump and then snuck in the mattress through the side door. 

So Lydia slept on the air mattress, Derrick slept on the couch bed, Charlotte and Veronica shared a bed, and Brandon and I shared the other bed. I read the kids The Hobbit until they fell asleep - which honestly wasn't very long at all. 

And that was the fourth day of our vacation. 

Bear Lake Vacation - Day Three - Beach Day

I haven't mentioned this yet. This camping trip to Bear Lake was actually our first family camping trip in almost two years! The last time we'd all been camping together was when we went to Yellowstone over  Labor Day weekend in 2021. 

We hadn't been able to go camping together in 2022 thanks to the fact that we'd nearly outgrown the Honda Pilot. We could barely fit in there on regular trips to see family when we DIDN'T have a tent, and camp chairs, and sleeping bags, and a camp stove, and a water cooler, and 5 days of snacks with us. 

The other reason we didn't go camping in 2022 was because we had Lagoon passes. I know, poor us. 

But seriously, as fun as it was to go to Lagoon a bunch of times last year, it really limited our ability to do anything else. 

So it was good to get back to camping as a family. 

We'd given all the kids Melatonin before they went to sleep the night before. Veronica takes Melatonin every night, but this was a new thing for the other kids. They all slept so well!

They'd been up before 6:00 on the first morning. This time they slept until about 7:30. That was nice. 

Here's Derrick and Veronica on their side of the tent. 

And Charlotte and Lydia on their side. 

Me and Brandon share and air mattress in the middle of the tent, but I didn't get a picture of us.

Here's Brandon cooking breakfast. (His shirt says you can go blind from his sheer awesomeness.) 

This was probably our most elaborate meal of the whole trip. We'd bought bacon and eggs when we were in Logan and so Brandon cooked those. I also bought bananas, and a package of cinnamon rolls. We'd brought grapes, mini bagels, a tang from home. And we had the root beer flavored shelf milk from my Aunt Karen. Everyone tried the shelf milk and I think most everyone liked it.  

Around 9:30 we moved the canopy down to the beach. We could see down to the day use area. It was already filling up with people. But we were the only people on our beach for a long time. Even after other people started filling in it was never very crowded. 

Derrick helped me fill up all of our inflatables. We have two round floaties, a boat, and a whale. We hadn't used any of these since 2021. (Again because of Lagoon.) I'd wondered if any of these floaties had developed holes so Derrick and I had blown them up a few days before the trip. They were all in good condition. He was excited to help me blow them up again. We used our pump that connects to the car outlets so it only took us a few minutes.  

It was so great to play on the water with these floaties. 

There aren't any pictures of me on the floaties, but that doesn't mean I didn't play on them. I was on one for probably 90 minutes.  I'd got out really far in the water and then jump on the floaty and relax while it slowly drifted into shore.  Then I'd either get a kid to pull me back out or I'd paddle back with my hand.  Later I stole one of the boat paddles and used that. 

Here I am on the beach, but let's keep talking about floating. THIS was what I'd been waiting for this whole trip. It had been a good trip. But when I was floating on the water is when I finally relaxed.  And I do mean finally. This summer has been so full of activities and therapies and work and summer school, and this and that and other things that I haven't really had a chance to slow down. I really needed a day on the water to just let go of everything. 

Our entire plan for the day consisted of two things. 1. Do not leave the State Park. 2. Spend as much time on the beach as possible. Everyone was on board with that plan. When the kids were sick of the water they would play in the sand. They liked this big watery hole. 

They build a lot of elaborate sand castles. 

At one point they flooded their network of rivers and lakes.

I'm not sure why I took this picture, but here's the view of our floaties on the shore and some being used. 

I went up to the car to get some snacks. I noticed our neighbors who had been there both nights we were had packed up and were gone. A lot of the other campers were gone as well. I guess most people had to get back to real life for work on Monday. But we didn't. Here's our tent and you can see the lake just beyond the trees. 

And here's the view of our spot on the beach. I NEVER got sick of the view on this path. 

I'd thought we were so smart brining the canopy - and we were - but the kids didn't spend nearly as much time in its shade as I'd thought they would. Really they just came under there for snacks. In hindsight I should have been really vigilant about re-applying sunscreen every time the kids took a snack break. But I didn't keep very good track of that. 

Here I am enjoying a juice. 

I like this view from the canopy. I loved having the towels hang down. It looked so fun.

And another view of looking out at the water. 

At one point I needed to buy something. I didn't want to leave the park so I was glad that there was a little store down by the day use beach. That's where you could rent things like kayaks or even wave runners. They also had a lot of things for sale. 

I decided I should also buy some After Care stuff for our inevitable sun burns. (I could already feel the burn on my upper thighs from all the time I'd been out floating. I knew the kids had to have their own burns.) It was an expensive bottle, but I was willing to pay for it because I didn't want to leave the park and because I knew we'd need it before too long. 

As I was driving to and from the day use area I could help but notice the parking situation. There were absolutely no parking spots left for the day use beach. Any cars that were arriving were being directed to park on the grass along the fence by the camping areas. The cars were nearly to our campground. 

But in our actual camping area things were still very chill. And our beach still had very few people on it. 

Here are Derrick and Lydia enjoying the warm puddle. (Later I made Lydia put a swim shirt on because her shoulders and back were looking so crispy. 

Here's our area from another angle. You can see some of the other family's on the beach. Way in the distance is the day use area. It was jam packed with canopies. 

At one point we all went way out into the water. The water was nearly to our heads. We bobbed around and had so much fun playing in the water. It's one of my favorite parts of the whole beach day. 

Some fun things that happened in the water were that we loved to feel the wavy sand under our feet. Derrick called it Rib Sand at one point. He liked to pick up big handfuls of sand and then mix them up in the water. They made big clouds of silt and sand. He'd call it a storm. 

After a while Brandon and I were cold and tired so we went back to the canopy.

Brandon actually knew how to use the shade. He got his computer and wrote for a while. 

I took one of the floaties and laid down in it. I was cold from being wet so I was in the sun, but I didn't want to get burned so I put a towel over my head. I took a long nap that way. Here I am peeking out when I woke up.

By that point the shade had moved over to the area where the kids had been digging. I went over there and played in the sand for a while. Derrick kept remarking about how the shade had moved from where it had been in the morning. 

Here's my castle. 

We didn't really have a plan for when we'd be done at the beach. But around 5:00 the wind picked up. A group up the beach from us had their beach umbrella start blowing away. We were worried about the canopy so we decided to take it down. That really changed the dynamic of our beach area. 

Brandon and I were sitting in the shade above where the kids were playing. We were just having a nice conversation when all of a sudden Veronica started screaming. 

Brandon ran over to see what was going on. Derrick had thrown mud in her face. I think it was just supposed to be some innocent teasing, but his aim was a little too good. She had mud all over her eyes. Like ALL OVER. 

Brandon and I helped her up to the campsite and had her sit in a chair. I was getting water from our cooler and dumping it on her eyes with a cup, but that was barely helping. Her eyes had been open when Derrick threw the mud and so there was mud under her eye lids. 

Brandon was going to take her into the showers, but I told him I'd do it. Veronica was still crying pretty loudly and I didn't like the optics of a grown man taking a crying child into the shower.  So we just went into the shower and turned on the water. 

I've been doing this parenting thing for almost 13 years, but I've never seen anything like this. She had sand and silt everywhere! It took us a good five minutes to get everything out from under her eye lids. I also had her blow her nose and that was full of sand. 

We came out of the bathroom and I helped her change into dry clothes. She said her eyes still hurt. I tol her that her body needed to make tears and that would help her eyes push out the last of the tiny pieces of silt. Her eyes were also really red. I took this picture so she could see how red they were. Honestly, she's all read. Her face was sun burned and her shirt was red. 

I'll probably forget to write about it later so I'll just say that her eyes were fine. The next morning when she woke up her eyes were crusted in dirty sleepy dust. I told her that her eyes had been working all night. They'd made tears through the night and pushed out the little specks of silt.  She thought that was pretty cool. 

Brandon had everyone else come up to our campsite and get dressed. No one really complained. We'd been down at the beach for something like 10 hours. While we were walking back and forth from the campsite and the bathrooms a huge cottonseed storm kicked up. They were flying everywhere. It looked like snow. My cameral didn't capture them really well, but you can see them in this picture if you look at the blue sky. 

You can see them in the distance up against the trees in the background of this picture. 

Brandon made pasta and sauce (another of our go to super easy camping meals.) The kids gobbled it up.

Then we sat around the fire and vegged out. I started passing around the after sun lotion. At first the kids were a little suspicious of it. But gradually they started trying it. Each of the kids would sigh and so, "Oh that feels so much better!" 

I was happy that we had a campsite that was shaded in the evening. None of us could have handled more sun. Veronica was feeling better. For some reason she was having fun sitting in the dirt. 

Here I am. 

Around sunset I went down to the water again to walk along the shore and take some pictures. This is so pretty.

This lake is just amazing. 

I liked just standing there and staring at the water for a long time.  

I loved how the ripples on the water looked in this light. 

Back up at the campsite we were making our plans for the next day. We'd be packing up and heading to our hotel in Pocatello. We were all looking forward to being in a hotel. Brandon asked the kids if they wanted to go swimming at the beach the next morning before we left. Derrick said, "Dad, Look at Us!" It was so funny. He was right. No one looked like they wanted to go swimming ever again. Everyone was worn out and starting to feel their sun burns. 

What made our situation even funnier was to contrast it with a family that had shown up at the beach that afternoon. I started calling them The Fancy Family. We've camped around nice looking people before. When we were at a State Park in Washington three years ago it was like we were in the middle of an REI catalog. But this family was next level. They looked like they'd shopped at the outdoor section of Nordstroms or something.  The women were in cute sun dresses. The kids were in adorable clothes. The men were somehow in fancy shorts and casual shirts. I kept waiting for them to take a family picture or something, but they were just setting up tents and preparing food in their nice clothes.

They weren't in a group site, but somehow they were a large group. It seemed like a family reunion. I think they'd reserved one or two sites, but they'd put everything together on one site. More family members would show up and they would be just as fancy. I was fascinated by the whole group.

Even their stuff was fancy. The tents looked like they'd never got dirty. Their camping accessories looked straight out of a magazine. The people that had been their earliest in the day had been paddle boarding. They brought those up from the water and stacked them by the tents. They never got a canopy out that night, but the next morning they set one up. It wasn't a standard looking one like ours. Not it was beige and huge.  

Somehow even though the sun had set it was still really light outside. It was like the light was reflecting off the clouds and illuminating everything. We were in the shade and just sitting there exhausted. Meanwhile The Fancy Family had beautiful rays of Golden Hour sunlight shinning on them as they did everything. 

The contrast was hilarious. 

A few of us went down to the water one last time. It was really pretty down there. 

I'm so glad we were able to spend all this time right next to the lake. This trip had been everything I'd hoped it would be. 

Back up at the campsite the moon was rising. 

My camera take terrible moon pictures, but I tried anyway.

Veronica was the first one to say she wanted to go to sleep. I helped her into her pajamas and helped her into her sleeping bag. I think she was out almost immediately. She didn't say anything when Derrick came in a little bit later and made the air mattress bounce as he got situated. 

Charlotte and Lydia weren't too far behind. 

Brandon wasn't enjoying our air mattress very much. It would gradually loose air during the night and that was hurting his back. He said he just wanted to sleep on something hard and flat. So he slept on the table. Yeah the table. I suggested reclining one of the seats in the car, but he preferred the table. 

So he slept there all night and said it was really nice. 

And that's the end of our third day at Bear Lake.