Okay, so clearly I am way out of practice doing trip reports for longer journeys. I’m not even sure what I got distracted with since I wrote Part 4 early this month. (Well, this past weekend it was a wine festival, complete with getting ready for the first overnight guests we’ve had since before the pandemic, but the days before that, I don’t know).

Anyway, when I left off, we’d bedded down for the night in Pocatello at the end of Day 6 of our journey. On Day 7, our first destination was Malad City. We arrived at a time that the internet said their historical museum would be open, but nope, they’d changed their hours and not let Google know, so I took care of that for them. We then wandered around downtown to see what we could see. We ended up going into a drug store to see if they had any souvenirs and to my surprise and delight, found a huge fabric section that rivaled many quilt shops I’ve been in (they also had a good bit of yarn, so if they’d had more than a few bottles of Sally Hansen nail polish and maybe a cheese section, it would have been pretty much my perfect retail establishment).

After purchasing a few pieces of fabric and an Idaho magnet, we left Malad City heading to Preston, where we drove by and briefly stopped in front of a house that was in the Napoleon Dynamite movie. I’d only seen the film once, so didn’t remember the house, but it seemed to be the thing to do. We were stymied in our attempt to have pie with lunch by a broken AC unit at our target restaurant, but found a pizza pie alternative nearby and had a nice meal before setting off on the road once more.

Our next stop was Paris. The one in Idaho, of course. Their little historical museum was actually open, so of course we went in. One of the highlights for the monkeys was a vintage license plate.

After Paris, we headed to Soda Springs, home of a geyser that has been “tamed” to erupt every hour on the hour.

We ended our day in Idaho Falls, paying a bit extra to get a view of the falls from our hotel room. We got there late enough that all we did was check in and fall into bed, so I didn’t count that county in Day 7’s tally.

Day 7 photos are here. I had thought to get Day 8 into this entry as well but ran out of time/steam/opportunity to write mid-draft so figured it best to just clean up and publish what I had been able to do.