MOVIN’ ALONG TOWARD THE NEXT EVENT ;’-).

First I want to add these two photos that were taken after I had posted the previous day’s adventures.

Rosalie took this one and calls it “early morning bike ride”.

And finally we were successful at gathering everyone together for a group photo. And what a group this was! Many of them know each other from past outings, but we never felt like we were on the outside of a friendship circle as they were each and all so very inclusive of everyone.

Had we not followed some suggestions that a few of our new friends had given us, we would have missed some not to be missed places 😳. First one is the Bad Medicine Campground in the Kootenai National Forest. 

We lucked into a PRIMO spot with a view of Bull Lake from the top of a hill. We could walk down to the lake for views of the mountains and a cooling walk in the water.

Our campsite (and most others) had lots of room all around, we could have our lunch or reading time amongst the tall trees.

There was a trail from the boat launch back to our site which gave us at least a bit of a ‘hike”. We didn’t get to do any bike riding here, but our bikes had a beautiful resting site.

We agree that this may well be the nicest campground we have ever camped. It was beautiful, quiet, serene and peaceful. 

Not far from the campground is Ross Creek Cedars which was the second suggestion we took advantage of. It was awesome actually. Some of the cedars are over 500 years old, and we enjoyed walking through the forest of some relics and learning more about cedars than we had known. 

Downed trees were indeed giant.

Some had burls or gnarls that were interesting.

The bark on the older trees looked shredded.

Some showed their toes …

Others were simply fun to look at and play around.

Peek-a-boo…

We had to get at least one selfie before leaving this forest of Cedars.

Soon we were Beyond Hope…

A third suggestion before getting to Sandpoint ID was to visit Beyond Hope which is right on the Lake Pend Oerille (say Lake Ponderay). It is quite a pretty setting, but we sure did not like the campground. It was a very huge, upper and lower, field of RVs with marginal space between rigs. We had lunch at their restaurant overlooking the lake, and that was nice. But the campground itself had little to no shade (basically ‘no’ actually) and we had very little view of the lake. Apparently we were so unimpressed that neither of us took a photo of our site. Sigh, from perfect Bad Medicine CG in the forest to this. Ok - take the good with the bad, and you will better appreciate the good ;’-).

We did get to ride our bikes around at least a little. Everywhere along our ride there were deer and signs that said DO NOT FEED THE DEER.

Four bucks watched us as we stopped for a photo. Once the lead buck started to scrape and pound on the ground, we skedaddled quite quickly. But Susan got this great photo of them before we had to beat it!

Then, we got to touch part of the Berlin Wall. An apparent German billionaire has bought a large piece of property and built a very private, gated multimillion dollar estate. He brought with him a section of the Berlin Wall. One side is covered with graffiti (assuming the West side), the other is plain grey.

To think we could have missed all these fantastic things and experiences had it nor been for our Sisters On The Fly 😊. Thank you Sisters.

Susan got her, what has become usual, sunset photo to end our day and our stay here in Beyond Hope.