Wonderful Day

We had a great day today. We left Farewell Bend State Park and drove to the little town of Fruitland, ID, where we are staying at the Exit 3 RV Park. It's behind the A&W All American Foods convenience store and Chevron service station. It has 25 gravel pull-thru spaces, but only one was occupied when we arrived, by a friendly guy in a pickup camper. He has a pet rooster, so we decided to camp further away from the crowing and chose site #21. It's near the interstate, but not as noisy as you might think. The park is down an embankment, which shields it from most of the traffic noise.

The bonus is that Fruitland Produce Barn is between the service station and the RV park, so of course I had to go check that out.

We planned to visit Snively Hot Spring, south of Fruitland along the Snake River, near Lake Owyhee. We've only been to one hot spring before, one that was commercially developed, so a trip to this wild BLM recreation area was a bit of an adventure. We found information and directions on the web and got ready to sightsee and go for a soak. While I was packing my large black bag, I noticed it had some sand in the bottom, so I emptied it out. Something still remained in an inner zipper compartment. Wonderful! It was our long lost truck key and Bigfoot remote!

When we returned from our Alaska cruise, we were unable to locate these items, although we had a memory of having stashed them somewhere. We were in a hurry when we moved the truck and trailer to the storage area at Lake Pleasant RV Park, because our shuttle driver was waiting to take us to the hotel in downtown Seattle. We searched everywhere, but found no sign of these two essential items.

Fortunately, we found that the Bigfoot remote, which very convenient, is not actually essential. The system can be operated by the controls mounted in a small compartment on the side of the trailer. We decided that we needed to replace the truck key, but we got one that did not have the remote controls for the door locks and panic button. It was "only" $79. The one with the remote controls would have been much more. Besides, I was confident that my original key would turn up soon.

Well, it took a month, but it finally did show up. Yay!!!

The drive out to the hot spring was fairly long, but scenic. We moved from main highways to side roads and finally to a narrow road through a canyon. We parked and started to explore. Near the road is the source of the spring, which has been enclosed in a concrete collar to direct the water down to the river.

Each year the soaking pool or pools must be reconstructed with a rock barrier to keep the cold river water from overwhelming the hot spring water and carrying it away. The pool this year is rather large and shallow. We hear that it is popular in the evenings with families and later with rowdy teens, but we were the only ones there when we arrived.

The water is hottest right near the outlet from the source--hot enough to be painful, but it mixes quickly with the colder water surrounding. It's a bit of an odd experience: the water is hot near the top and cold near the bottom. On a 100 degree day, even the cold water was welcome! We spent about an hour at the spring, enjoying the water and the scenery.

A couple of women stopped by to check the temperature of the water, but they left quickly. A man arrived on a little motor scooter just as we were getting ready to leave. He told us that he was born in Amsterdam. He and several of his siblings had moved to the U.S. in the 70's, to Southern California. His sister bought a dairy farm in Idaho, and he and a couple of his brothers moved to Idaho to work on the dairy farm.

We spent more time looking at options for the next week or so and identified a couple of possible places to move tomorrow.

We walked in the evening, when it had had a chance to cool off a bit (not much--still in the 90's). This area is not great for walking, and when we returned home we realized that the soles of our tennis shoes were full of broken off spines from some nefarious prickly things! The sharp spines had to be painstakingly picked out of the soles with a pair of tweezers.