All we knew about Idaho before taking a contract there was that they grew potatoes. Every single bag of potatoes I remember seeing in grocery store has “Grown in Idaho” with a little Idaho state shape stamped on its label. The irony of this is the only potato we actually encountered once moving to Idaho was one we passed lying on the sidewalk in town. Probably dropped from an outbound truck taking its states number one commodity to the grocery stores I knew it from.

Idaho is so much more than potatoes, I almost don’t want to tell anyone else about it so that it never changes and becomes overrun like so many other beautiful places have. It’s already being flooded with refugees from California and Oregon who no longer agree with the political climate of their home states much to the dismay of the locals. The first thing we fell in love with was the people. Idaho is the only state where I’ve pulled up to the drive through window to order a coffee and had the barista prop her chin with her hand and ask her “how are you doing today?”, actually expecting more then a automatic “good thanks” in response. The people of this state work hard, play hard, and genuinely care about the people around them. Our neighbors would stop our car as we drove into town and have five minute conversations about our weekend plans. After Alaska ,where we never even met the neighbor who shared our duplex, we were in heaven.

The scenery in Idaho also captured our hearts. While Alaska was stunning in a grand way, Idaho had a quiet steady beauty that would sometimes surprise you by blossoming into amazing little spots of color and uniqueness. Shoshone Falls is in the heart of the town I worked in and the water that flows away from it adds into the Snake River which winds its brilliant blue ribbon all through the state. Idaho is also peppered with BLM land which we southerners were not used to. We were delighted to find that these areas were basically the outdoormans’s playground. It was shocking to me that you could bring a four wheeler or dirt bike with you to a BLM spot and ride anywhere you wanted, often for hundreds of miles. We spent a lot of time hiking, and practicing marksmanship in these lovely public access areas. To me, these sites are one of the ways that the west retains a little bit of its wildness. There are few rules, and those that exist are basic ones, the west just expects that you have common sense, and if you don’t use it… well that’s on you. I wish more places thought that way nowadays :).

In between days of work we ventured into the mountains to find hot springs to bathe in, or rented kayaks to travel the river to the cold spring box canyons where the water looked like something from the Bahamas – crystal clear and deeply tinted with aqua. We had two great man-fortified hot springs only fifteen minutes from our house, and as the weather turned colder, we headed there frequently, enjoying the natural mineral muscle relief. The pace of life felt slower in Idaho, people worked hard, but they also knew when to rest, and took time to enjoy the things that are more important in life then accumulating money – like each other.

Winter in Idaho opened up a myriad more of things we could do on our days off. For the first time ever we bought a permit for a Christmas tree and hiked up into the woods to chop our own. Snow fall started magically on Christmas Eve, and we watched it from our spots in front of the fireplace. There were several ski resorts nearby and when our families both came out to visit up for Christmas we took them on a trip to Bogus Basin to see the snow!

Our time in Idaho was so lovely that for the first time in my career as a travel nurse I agreed to a contract extension when my recruiter called to say I had been offered one near the end of my thirteen weeks. We knew we wanted more time to soak up this beautiful state that we had both been surprised to have fallen in love with. The land of potatoes turned out to be so much more 🙂