Mountain Climbing and Indecision!
This morning we set out from Pocatello, Idaho intending to go to a small town called Dillon in Montana.  We had a discussion last night that I would prefer to go to Helena or even Great Falls.  Don likes to drive 2 or 3 hours and then park for the day, I prefer to drive a big day and then have 2 or 3 days to settle in and explore.  Of course, as I don't drive the beast I didn't argue - too much.  Long story short, we got to Dillon and decided we would got to Butte.  We had to text Kylie and get her to look up an RV park for us as we have no internet. Butte looks like an interesting town, a lot of mining and interesting looking buildings and such - maybe next year!   As we listened to the radio, we could see that the weather was better in Helena so decided to keep going.  My sister Karen came to the rescue with an address for a campground and voila - here we are.  We plan on going to Great Falls tomorrow and staying until we can figure out the best route back to Canada - depending on the weather there.  We can go to Alberta or Sask from there.

Since the last blog we have moved 2 states west.  We have driven on the I95 since Vegas.  We had  two days of snowy, windy, rainy cold  in Provo.  We did manage to do a lot of shopping and eating out.  Even my walks were cut short as I am not used to the cold at all.  Need to get out the ear muffs and gloves.  I did manage to read most of a historical novel about Utah and the Latter day Saints called "The 19th Wife"  Very interesting, and it also mentions many of the city's and towns that we have been in.

When we woke up there was snow all the way to the bottom of the mountain, it had only been about the top third the day before.  Lots of cars had huge chunks of snow accumulations.  We got a clear day so decided to go to Pocatello, Idaho where we stayed for 2 nights

The rock was really square and chunky, interesting landscape.  We didn't do much outdoors here either as the temperatures and wind were very cold. Daytime highs were only 7 to 10 C and lows were -5 to -7.
We did manage to do a lot of shopping and eating out - which is always fun.  I needed to find a bridesmaid dress for my sister Tami's wedding coming up this summer.  I was very pleased to finally find one that I hope will work.  Luckily I also found some jeans and a new T-shirt.
The scenery today was so varied and there were a lot of cattle ranches and cattle feed crops since we left Provo.

 It was really interesting to watch all the cattle being herded up with horses and ATV's.

The rolling hills were just so pretty. I did manage to see some cranes, a lot of different raptors, some ducks and geese along the way.

The scenery could change within a mile or two, we would be looking at beautiful rolling hills one minute and flat valley the next.
We did have to pass through 2 big passes in the mountains.  It is really beautiful and more than a little scary in some spots.

 Thats a long way down!

I watched this river for miles, winding its way like a snake and then flow along side the highway. I am so lucky to sit and watch all this amazing stuff and eat licorice and dried peas while Don does all the difficult stuff.

Fifty shades of  . . .  amazing!
Yesterday, Saturday April 13, we went to Thanksgiving Point  which is north west of Provo in a town called Lehi.  It was a chilly, cloudy day but the forecast was not looking any better so we went for it.  It was the second day of the Tulip festival.  A lot of the tulips were not yet blooming as they have had an unusually cold spring.
It is an absolutely beautiful facility.  They have guided garden tours, gardening demonstrations, a craft and garden market as well as a beautiful restaurant with a string quartet playing when we were there.  There are a quarter of a million tulips as well as thousands of spring flowers.
https://www.thanksgivingpoint.org/visit/thanksgivingpointgardens
The area is huge, 55 acres and has 15 theme gardens.  There is a rose garden and a butterfly garden which I would love to see in the summer.
As excited as Don wasn't to go, he even had to admit it was pretty impressive.

This is the view from the visitor centre to the vista mound garden which is about in the centre of the facility.

and vise versa.

I am so glad these tulips were blooming, it was a sea of red all around the top.

It was beautiful to walk around and see flowers everywhere.  Hyacinths and daffodils were tucked in every possible spot.  This waterfall was huge.

I loved this living carousel.

There were a lot of these interesting looking oak trees that had forgotten to drop their leaves.  There was also a small pond that was alive with koi.

One of these gardens had quite a number of religious statues which were very well done.

This was the Italian Garden, the water flowed from a beautiful statue through all these huge pots.

this one was called the secret garden .

I don't think I have ever seen either of these flowers before.  The top one looks like upside down tulips with 4 or 5 on each stalk and the pink ones were very small.

I did not realize there were so many varieties of daffodils.

These were some of my favorite tulip pictures.

Hard to even imagine the work and cost of setting up this facility.

More tulips  - after all it was the tulip festival.  It was a great way to get our walk in for the day, not everyday you can see this amazing color.

Most of the trees and bushes were labelled which was really nice, as I have never heard of many of these plants.  This tree was bare except for these huge white flowers.  Amazing!
Off in the distance we kept hearing what sounded like thunder.  Turns out it is an army training area and we were hearing them practise live fire training.

It looks like a huge facility as well.

And last but not least:

Provo - Downtown, Bridal Veil Falls and Utah Lake
Thursday and Friday we had a great time exploring Provo.  It is a really different atmosphere here and really, really beautiful.  The roads are very interesting to manoeuvre and luckily Don is great with direction and driving or I don't quite know where we would be by now.  The roads crossed over at one point today where we were actually driving on the wrong side of the road (don't worry we were SUPPOSED to be driving on the wrong side of the road)  There are many very strange intersections and even the GPS was stumped a few times.  We parked in downtown Provo and walked the main street.  Most of the buildings are very old and very nice.  One of them had a date on the top of 1890.  There were some really fun shops and tons of interesting and multi cultural restaurants.  There was a bike shop and a really fun and huge theatrical store.

This was one of the newer buildings, a public centre of some sort that had tons of these beautiful little pin wheels that blew and shone in the sunlight.  It was an awareness campaign for prevention of child abuse.

As we walked down the street the beautiful snow covered mountains towered above the shorter building.

The buildings were all amazing and really well preserved.

This was surrounded by a fence but I believe they are re-doing this beautiful old temple.  All the cone shaped towers were sitting on the ground wrapped up with plastic waiting to be put back on.

We walked right through this little scenario before we realized they were doing a commercial for a restaurant.  It was pretty funny to watch.  In one of the old buildings there was an amazing little market.  It had the hugest chandelier I have ever seen and all the little home made items were so pretty.  I would have loved to take some pictures but it was so crowded I really had to GET OUT!  There are families with a lot of children everywhere. So different from the demographics of Arizona that's for sure!  This would be an excellent place to raise children.  There are tons of children's wear stores and amusement  parks.
Then we took a drive up Provo Canyon to Bridal Veil Falls.

It was a beautiful park and a nice sunny day, we walked along the river up to the falls.

 There are actually 2 falls,  very nice

 There were some trout at the base of the falls, and you could even buy some fish food - IF you had a quarter.

 There were a lot of redwood along the river which was a nice contrast to the mostly still bare trees.  Don was talking to a fellow who lives here and apparently they usually get about 6 days of freezing a year.  This year they have had 26 so far and tonight there is a threat of it going up to 27 days.  They are having unusually cold weather and are impatiently waiting for spring warm up.

 This is a cell tower tree - I think its pretty cool

I had to take a picture of this huge "hippy van" for my nieces.  It had pretty flowered wallpaper of some sort on all the windows.
We came home and saw that we were only going to get a couple of good days weather before the rain and cold is back so we decided to walk over to the Utah Lake state park which is just down the road.

I love all the blue!  It was so pretty and bright, I was sorry that I left my sunglasses at home.

 There were a number of people out fishing, and there were a few water birds.  We both had to lose the jackets half way through the walk and THAT is a good thing!

This grass was so huge, taller than Don!

Saw this today and well, I think its really cool

Tomorrow I will tell you about the Tulip festival (that is what we did today) but I had too many pictures for one blog.