David Cook, and other Idaho adventures

I had so much fun in Idaho! It was EXACTLY what I needed! Of course, as usual, I wish it had lasted longer.. but it was a good escape, and an awesome experience.


Wednesday:

We left semi-early that morning, had to go get Ashley's car travel ready at Jiffy Lube, and then we were off to Idaho. We drove straight through to Pocatello, where we got gas (and had a funny experience with a one way street. tee~hee)



.. then we got back on the road and drove to our hotel in Idaho Falls. As we drove into town we saw a sign for Frontier Pies (that now I realize I should have taken a pic of the actual sign, aw well), right then and there we decided we had to eat their yummy corn bread while we were in town. They no longer have Frontier Pies in Utah, and we really like their corn bread, yummmm.

After checking in to our hotel, we went to Sizzler for dinner, and then went over to the Civic Auditorium where we saw this beautiful man..



First up was Crash Kings, which they were pretty good! I really liked one of their songs, My Love. (its on MySpace, if you want to take a listen)



THEN the main event: David Cook!

pure, David inspired happiness

when the concert was over, we decided to wait in line with some other peeps out by his tour bus. Crossing our fingers that he would really come out to see us before he went on his way. We only had to wait for, I don't even know, no longer than 40 minutes and he came out to see us! So, we got his autograph, he was so nice, with all those flashing lights in his face, and crazy girls yelling things at him, he just patiently went to each person to give them his autograph. He touched my hand, as he took our tickets from me, and I tell ya, I sincerely thought about not washing my hand afterwords. However, I think I'm too big of a germa phobe for that to even last..

I don't know how well you can see him, but Dave is standing on the left side of this picture. It was after he had signed our tickets, and had moved on.. He couldn't pose for pictures, so this was the best we could get. This was Ashley's genius idea.

Thursday:

We got up pretty early, ate our free breakfast at the Hotel - that we could have done without, even Ashley, the biggest lover of breakfast was not satisfied.

on the way to Rexburg

Then we moved on and drove up to Rexburg, to Yellowstone's Bear World. This place was awesome! We've driven past it before, but never stopped. It's only $15 a person, and you get to drive around where they have animals in an open air type zoo. You basically drive through a Yellowstone-esque looking habitat for the animals, and you just have to keep moving, with your windows rolled up, and you can see the animals. Including bears! I was a little nervous about this place.. cause you get SO CLOSE to the animals, and bears scare me a little.. but it was a lot of fun! We saw, buffalo, a rare white elk, mountain goats, a moose, and BEARS. One bear happened to be in the road, just walking, while we came around the bend. It was kind of scary! Ashley was driving and she's like NIKKI WHAT DO I DO?! Because you're not supposed to stop, but you also don't want to scare the bears or anything.. eek. Ash just slowed down a little, and her engine revved as it was going like 2 mph slowly, behind the bear, the bear heard the car, and started running away from us. Awe man, a little nerve racking, that's for sure. But really awesome.

The bear in front of Ash's car.. eek!

They also have baby bears near the gift shop, walking area at Bear World. I guess they have to remove them, so they aren't hurt by the male bears in the park. They were super cute. You can bottle feed them for $50 bucks, but we aren't made of money. There's also a petting zoo. I don't think I've ever really been to a petting zoo! Or at least not for a really long time . We pet deer and mountain goats in there, we could have pet chickens, turkeys, and a pig that was snoring SUPER loud, but we didn't want to wake him.. we DID laugh at his funky snoring though, that's for sure.

We made friends with a Mountain Goat, that Ash has dubbed "Rex", he was interesting. He was pretty young, and followed us around for awhile.. he really wanted food. He even butt Ashley's hand, and my legs a little because he still wanted food and attention. Silly guy.

After Bear World, we made our way back down to Idaho Falls, and had our cornbread..

Yes. There is butter in my hair. Oops.

Leaving Idaho Falls, we decided to travel across southern Idaho and go over to Twin Falls. Near Twin Falls, in Castleford, Idaho, there is a cool natural landmark called Balanced Rock. Its basically amazing. It's a wind-carved rock, that stands 48 feet tall, and weights FORTY TONS. It balances on a pedestal that is only 3 feet by 17 inches!





It felt so good to hike up there after driving so much in 2 days!

Then we drove down through Wendover, stopped in a tiny town called Wells, Nevada for some BK grub (where all the stores were closed, the gas station store was empty, and the dudes in Burger King were talking about unemployment.. talk about a recession reminder), and made our way over the salt flats back home. All in all, we fit a lot into 2 days, and it was a lot of fun.

the moon over the salt flats

Here is a slideshow of all the pictures we took, if you just can't get enough ;)