We started our day in the little town we spent the night in – Rigby, ID. It has a very small main street, but we spotted a cute bakery, and stopped in for cinnamon rolls! We decided on a tray of both regular and maple, and then the girl told us that someone had left money to pay for the fifth customers of the day! We were super excited and it was so nice of them. We sat right down on the sidewalk and enjoyed the delicious sugariness! Everyone agreed that maple was the best.
We walked the little main street, and admired the mural on the local BBQ place. Then we loaded up and headed into Idaho Falls, the “big” city that anchors this area. We explored their super pretty riverwalk along the Snake River, and then discovered that their Farmer’s Market was open! There were a ton of sculptures of Idahoan wildlife, and a super cool art initiative called “art you can sit on.” We made sure to sit on most of them! A crowd favorite was the flock of Canada geese! We also read a bunch of placards on the history of Idaho Falls, and talked about how instrumental bridges were. An entire community sprang up simply because a man built a bridge over the Snake River!
Then we explored the Farmer’s Market, and picked out a few foodie treats to sample. It was so fun to be at a place where we could be around other people and do something fun and outdoorsy! We spent a long time at the Sugared Moose Mini Donuts. They had this awesome machine that did most of the fry work by itself. Javi, our little inventor, was fascinated with how it worked.
Then, of course, we had to sample the “World’s Best Corndogs” at the little corndog truck. We all agreed that we couldn’t speak definitively on whether or not they were the BEST, but they were pretty darn good!
We had more time to kill until we could check in to our Airbnb, so we wandered around the streets of Idaho Falls for another hour or so. We finally found what we were looking for – street art! There was a little alley called Puggs Lane and it was filled with street art!
Lastly, we made our way to the Friendship Garden and explored everything in the Japanese garden there. It was picturesque, and the kids enjoyed climbing on the rocks and giving us heart attacks about falling to their deaths in the falls below.
Over dinner, we discussed tithing with the kids. They all made money from the garage sale before we left, so we encouraged them to give a percentage of that back to God as a thanks for his blessing. Then we had to discuss what moving the decimal point and 10% meant! We also talked to the kids about being kind to each other – being in small spaces like motel rooms and the van for hours on end is highlighting some relationship issues that we need to address!
Once we got to our Airbnb, we got connected to the internet and spent some time chatting with the proofreader we hired. She’s awesome, and she gave us glowing feedback on our book, which is always awesome to hear. She’s helping us out with a few more things, and then we also spent some time finding the (hopefully) right person to hire to write the “back of the book blurb” for both the book and the Amazon listing. It’s incredibly hard to boil a book down to its very essence, while still being snappy and eye catching and pithy. So, we decided that was work best left to the professionals! It’s exciting to be moving forward on all of this, and getting ever closer to listing our book on Amazon!