Since I wrote my last entry, I’ve done a lot of stuff, including helping my mom get settled in a nursing home. She’s in a rehab unit for now; depending on how things go with her therapy and medication and such, we’ll figure out what happens after this.

One of the things I’ve done is sort through the photos from the Idaho trip, so I can now write a few words to go with some of them. Our journey started early one Saturday morning; we got to the parking lot near the airport around sunrise.

On our drive from the airport in Spokane, we stopped at a state park in Idaho, thinking we might go sledding, but there wasn’t really enough snow for that. We thought we were going to get to Sandpoint in time to eat a late lunch/early dinner at the Pie Hut, but forgot that they close earlier on Saturdays, so arrived just in time to grab a couple of pies to eat later in the week. We had that late lunch/early dinner at another local restaurant, one we’d been meaning to try for a long time but just hadn’t managed to.

Sunday was our first ski day. There was some confusion about what equipment we’d left in the locker at the base, so Mr. K ended up not having his poles to start the day. Rather than walk back to the condo to get them, we skied back and had lunch there. Our condo is not technically ski-in, ski-out, so our route took us through other people’s yards and on roads, but we go there. On the way, we got a view of the castle house.

Later that day, it snowed what looked like pure white Dippin’ Dots. Even later, we watched a laser show projected onto one of the ski runs—that was a first for us (the ski run part, not the laser show).

On the days between the laser show and when we headed out to drive back and see Mom, there was more skiing, of course. There was also some sledding, which we did in our neighbors’ driveway and the street. This was my childhood sled, which Mr. K decided we could hang on the wall of the condo only after we’d used it, so use it we did.

Somewhere in there, we took a morning off to be around for our appointment to finally get the broken window replaced. The tape I’d put on it to stabilize the shattered pane back in December had held up so well that the glass guys carried it out to their truck as it was. It was Presidents’ Week, a traditionally busy time for skiing, but still there were instances when I had whole runs to myself.

Because we left Idaho sooner than planned, we started our drive back at a time of day we don’t usually, which meant our nightly stops were all in places we hadn’t stayed before. We had a nice view of the river in Missoula, not that we had much time to admire it. The town we stayed in in South Dakota was so tiny that the motel office was closed when we got there, an envelope with our keys, name, and room number taped to the front door. Security sure is different out there. Driving through Wisconsin, we learned that little Cascade Mountain is quite a draw—there were quite a lot of people around for what I thought was off season in the Dells. Because we were hurrying, there was no time to linger at attractions, but I did take a couple minutes to look around wherever we stopped for gas or rest. I think this fierce bear was in Montana somewhere.

The whole photoset for the trip is here.