FRYE FAMILY: Winter Weekend Getaway

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Winter Weekend Getaway

Story time with Grammy!

We have been pretty busy around our home with trying to get the basement finished, getting prepared for baby girl, moving furniture, etc. We decided to take a break and go up to Swan Valley, Idaho for the weekend. It was a quick, spur of the moment trip. Grammy wanted to join the fun so we left Friday afternoon and picked Shawn up from work. The kids and Shawn have all been fighting colds, but we decided to go anyway. It is so pretty up there. We got there and had a relaxing Friday evening and Saturday morning. Saturday morning we got the ATV running and Red running and the kids had a blast riding around in those. Shawn even set up a little course around the house for the ATV's with a jump. About 11 a.m. we headed over to Driggs to have a half day skiing at Grand Targhee. I love that resort. I think it is so family friendly. I missed being able to ski with Cruz through eyeball forest, bobsled, candy cane lane, and several other fun tree runs designed for small kids. Grammy, Shawn, and Cruz all had a blast skiing. We brought Alegra's skies and I helped her for a while on those but she really doesn't like to stand on her own skies yet. We had fun walking around, getting hot chocolate, taking a nap in the car, and I brought a sled to pull her around the resort on. I actually couldn't believe how long Cruz skied. He skied most of the afternoon with a short "snack" break. Cruz actually even slid 3 boxes in the terrain park. He was so excited he did that!

After skiing we drove over to Victor to our favorite pizza place. It was pretty busy but they have this hockey game that Cruz loves to play so it wasn't too bad to have to wait. We were headed home just past Pine Creek Pass when we ran into some trouble. I guess Shawn ran over something (neither of us saw anything in the road) but it wiped up and damaged a bunch of things inside the wheel well. Pink fluid was draining out of the back right tire and the back fender was torn off some. We were in the minivan. Typically we drive the truck up to Idaho because we are packing a lot of stuff but since we went for just a short trip we thought it would be nice to have the DVD player for the kids. With minivans our wheel well is closer to the tire so the "thing" did some damage, I was kind of kicking myself because if we were in the truck it really only would have been a flat tire. Oh well, we actually were very lucky and blessed with the entire situation. Once we hit the "thing" Shawn pulled over and realized we had some trouble. We weren't in a great spot but only a few hundred feet up the road there was a large pull off area, which is not common on that stretch of road, plus we were in the flatter part of the drive. Shawn got out of the car to try and walk around to get cell phone service and the first truck that passed pulled over to help us out. He was this really nice guy that had a 6 seater truck, enough room for all of us and was willing to take us to our home since he was headed toward Idaho Falls. We quickly decided that was the best option and transferred the kids seats to his truck. Honestly, we were so lucky. We hardly were on the side of the road. Once we got back to the cabin Shawn lined up a tow truck to pick up the minivan and take it to the Toyota dealership in Idaho Falls. The only thing that wasn't great is that all the rental car places were closed in Idaho Falls for the evening. Shawn was going to try and get a ride with the tow truck driver to Idaho Falls and bring a car back. Our neighbor Burt totally helped out though. He lent Shawn his truck Saturday evening to meet the tow truck driver at the minivan and then this afternoon Burt took all of us into town (Idaho Falls) to the airport to rent a vehicle. We ended up getting a Suburban and it even had a DVD player which made the kids happy. We stopped at our minivan at the dealership to pick up some of our belongings and then hit the road. Honestly, for running into a problem, it actually all turned out pretty smooth. We do need to figure out how we are going to get the minivan back home, but hopefully something will work out or we will head up to Idaho for another weekend getaway!