McCall and Mountain Home, ID

While in McCall we stayed at the McCall RV Resort, one of the G7 RV Resorts.  It's a somewhat large, multi-tiered park, in a nice location just outside of town and along the Payette River. It has a great indoor/outdoor pool and an indoor hot tub, with 6 private spa quality bathrooms/showers. The sites a large and nicely landscaped, with some shaded. We stayed in one of their "quads" which I'd never seen before, where four pull throughs are arranged as the sides of a square, with a green space in the middle. It makes it easy to meet your neighbors, and easy to party together if you are camping with a group. There was a little partying going on in one of the quads near us, complete with ukulele playing and singing! That's a first for us too.

The view from the lower tier of the resort, of the river and the adjacent public park is great.

There is a large wooded and wetland area next to the RV park, perfect for taking walks down to the river. Kona got to swim a couple of times.  I got up early on our last morning there and got these misty pictures of the river.

There's lots of wildlife in the area as well. Twice on the morning that I took these photos, I saw ospreys diving into the water to catch fish. The sound was surprising - like someone throwing a ten pound rock in the water. We saw deer and three resident foxes (often), who the resident people feed (unfortunately).

The Payette River also seems to have a northern branch the feeds into Payette Lake, though I'm not sure that is the correct name for it.  We went kayaking on that river, and in my opinion it is the most perfect kayaking location (for us) that we've been on so far. It has a gentle current, no white water, and meanders through forest, rocky cliffs and wetlands, providing interesting and varied scenery.

 There are several easy places to put in your non-motorized water craft, like this one where we launched our kayaks easily.

The river meanders all the way to the lake, in case you want to paddle there as well. There are several sandy beaches on the river and the lake, so swimming is definitely an option. The water is crystal clear so the bottom is also interesting to see. Supposedly there are salmon, beaver and otters living in the river. 

After we left McCall, we headed south along Rt. 95 to Mountain Home.  The scenery changed dramatically from wooded mountains, to farms, and finally to desert. We are now at the Mountain Home RV Park.  It has the longest sites we've ever seen, and if they just had a pool, we'd give it a perfect 10.  Although it's not the the most scenic area, the park is run so efficiently, and so well taken care of, that it's a pleasure to be here. It's still a work in progress with lots of space to expand. So this is great place to do all of life's normal things that go between adventures: cleaning, reading, planning the itinerary, cooking, laundry, shopping, repairs, watching the US Open and the GOP Primary, and resting, because there isn't a whole lot nearby to visit.  

There is the Bruneau Dunes State Park, about 40 miles south, and we went there this morning for the sunrise. 

 

It's a relatively small dunes area compared to some in the US, but it does claim to have the tallest single dune in the country. It basically has two - a big one and a little one. Here they are:

The dunes are next to a shallow lake, where I saw this heron.

Route 51 crosses the Snake River south of Mountain Home and we saw several flocks of white pelicans in this location that were too far away to photograph well. The Snake River sure does get around. 

Somewhere near here is the Snake River Birds of Prey Conservation Area that we may get to before we leave.  Other than that, we're just chillin'.  This is our last stop in Idaho; we'll be heading to Utah on Sunday.

P.S. No fires near here, though there are several huge ones in Idaho right now.  Sometimes we get the smoke in a hazy, dissipated way. I guess they're having a really hard time containing them. We saw the smoke jumper center, and the planes and helicopters that work out of McCall. Thank goodness we happen to be skirting around the fires.