Day 06

I had to say good-bye to Briggs today as he was flying to Santa Ana, California.  He is the process of moving from Florida and needed to scout out apartments. I was so sorry to see him go. He kept me exercising and eating somewhat healthy (not counting the Bacon Maple Sundae). He was out the door to catch the airport shuttle at about 5am. I'm sure he's going to have fun in California.

Angela didn't fly in until about 3:30pm, so I had a good part of the day to kill. I scouted out the airport and then headed downtown.  What a gorgeous city.  Snow-capped mountains are visible throughout downtown.  And it may be the cleanest major city that I have ever seen. I took the opportunity to wash the car - the second car wash of the trip. Today is Angela's birthday, and I wanted to car to be especially spiffy for her.

When Angela arrived, we headed north to Idaho. Our destination for the evening was Idaho Falls, which is in the southeast corner of the state.  Salt Lake City is a large metropolis, and it took us a while to get of it and the surrounding suburbs. But when we did, it was amazing countryside. The west is just so big, wide-open and varied.  The scenery continued into Idaho, where parts look like Switzerland.  We were headed due north up I-15, with huge mountains immediately to our east and some intermittent farmland to our west.

We stopped for dinner in Malad City (also known as just Malad) - it is the only city in Oneida County.  Population is about 2,100.  The city was named for the French word for sick - malade (the "e" was subsequently dropped from the city's name). The name came from some early French trappers who got sick camping in the area and blamed it on the river. Subsequent trappers had no such problems. It is believed that the French trappers had eaten some bad beaver - beaver that had fed on the poisonous roots of the "water hemlock".  While beaver is immune to the poison, the amount of it in the beaver's body would have made the men very ill.  Natives had learned to boil the beaver first before eating it.  So there you go... and I'm going to leave it at that.

Here are some more fun facts about Malad:

• It lays claim to having more people of Welsh descent per capita than anywhere outside of Wales.
• In 1910, the earthen dam north of Malad broke and flooded the city.
• In 1975, a 6.1 magnitude earthquake caused damage to two-thirds of the buildings in Malad.
• In 1996, a turbo-prop airplane carrying Coca-Cola executives crashed outside the city killing all eight people on board. The NTSB determined that icing was the cause of the accident. BTW, the plane did not take-off or intend to land in Malad; it was just flying overhead.
• In 2003, a national influenza outbreak hit Malad the hardest, and the city was virtually shut down.
• Because of its proximity to Utah, which has no lottery, the tiny city of Malad accounts for 19 percent of the total Idaho lottery sales. One local store alone sells 3 percent of all Idaho lottery tickets.

Angela's big birthday dinner was at a small restaurant called "Me-N-Lou's".  There is a story behind the name, but I forgot it - however, I believe we were served by the "Me" in the name.  Much like the restaurant in Wellington UT, the service here was very good, the food good and the portions enormous. Being Idaho and all, the potatoes were a large part of the dinner.  But the amazing part were the scones with raspberry honey. I checked on the definition of scone and it says "a small unsweetened or lightly sweetened biscuitlike cake". These were pie-sized, deep-fried, covered in sugar, airy flat cakes.  In other words, the exact opposite of a scone. When we explained to "Me" that we loved them but that these were not traditional scones, she stared at us as if she couldn't understand the words coming out of our mouths.  That might have been the case, since our mouths were stuffed with "scones"... however, she insisted that this was indeed a traditional scone. Having entered that dreamy part of a diabetic coma, I had lost all enthusiasm for arguing or continuing this discussion.

We waddled out of "Me-N-Lou's" with some spare scones and raspberry honey under our arms and headed back north on I-15. The interstate snakes its way through the valleys on the way to Idaho Falls with small farming communities along the route (see below).

Unfortunately, we took no pics today. We are staying two nights here in Idaho Falls at a very large Hampton Inn.  Our room is the last one on the right on the top floor and our keys appear to work only once before going blank. Tomorrow we shoot for the moon.