First up: a bed and breakfast, just north of Grangeville, Idaho. We stopped and talked with the proprietor and his wife for a while. They clearly had some fun with this. The “fire hydrant” at right is actually a functioning outhouse. The beagle is a room you can rent – note the window just forward of his ear. Cute. There are several rooms like this. We zoomed by, both of us exclaiming...then turned around to come back and check it out. These are definitely “dog people”!
Our property is in a little “island” of private property inside a National Forest; we get to it from a National Forest gravel road. Take that road a few miles further and you'll come to the Lunch Peak lookout, seen at left. This looked much different than our memories of it, but we can't tell if that's because our memories are faulty or if the place has really changed. Neither of us, for instance, remembered the lookout as being enclosed. Nor did we remember it being locked and inaccessible.
On the way up and back from Lunch Peak, we stopped at a couple of places to pick huckleberries, which are prevalent in any open area. They were just beginning to turn red for the fall color when we were there; this made it very easy to spot patches of huckleberries! They were delicious – juicy, sweet, deep purple. Yum!
My favorite aspect of our property is the water running through it. As a denizen of the high desert, running water seems quite exotic – and large quantities of running water even more so. There are three streams running through or alongside our property. The photos below are all time exposures (20 seconds to 60 seconds) of the three. As usual, click to enlarge.
The entire building is tilted at a rakish angle, as though the Barber Ship were cresting a wave. However, the floor inside is level – which makes for an odd-looking room in which two of the walls appear to be dangerously tilted. We found lots of humorous signs all over Idaho, but more in Bonner's Ferry than anywhere else. We're not sure where this culture of commercial humor came from, but we sure enjoyed it. We also had a great meal in Bonner's Ferry – so good we had to come back another day for a repeat. The place was called Papa Byrd's Bistro, and it had spectacularly good soups, the best pizza I've had in years, and an equally spectacular sandwich. If you're ever up in Bonner's Ferry, don't miss that joint!
In the parking lot for Roosevelt Grove, we came across a phenomenon we've seen before: butterflies apparently attracted to the minerals on the ground. Usually we've seen this alongside mudpuddles or on damp earth; here it was on bone-dry soil. Later in the day we saw even more of them, for miles on the shoulders of a gravel road. Whatever the reason, we've found you can approach these butterflies quite easily – they appear to be lost in rapture or something, not paying much attention to the large, dangerous humans stalking them with a camera!
