Shae and I have just finished up spending a month in Idaho – the 43rd state on our 50 state road trip. Visiting from mid-March to mid-April wasn’t the ideal time of year to visit due to the weather and lingering snow in some parts of the state, so that ended up affecting how much we were able to see and do in the state.
We stayed in three main locations – Idaho Falls, Boise and Coeur d’Alene. Here’s what we got up to during our 8 days in Idaho Falls.
Where We Stayed
We stayed all 8 nights at the Candlewood Suites Idaho Falls. Our stay started off fairly well, with them giving us an upgrade to a room with a balcony overlooking the river (although they said they didn’t have any upgrades to one bedroom suites despite them still having that room type available on their website).
Overall it was a good stay, but there were a couple of weird elements. One was a sign in the elevator which asked guests to not only send money to their housekeeping staff, but to their front desk and maintenance team too.
This hotel was also home to possibly our weirdest experience since we started living in hotels 6.5 years ago. We tend to decline housekeeping on all our hotel stays, so when our trash can is full we leave it outside our room at night or first thing in the morning so that housekeeping can empty it on their way down the hall. This is something we’ve always done and have never had an issue at any other hotel, plus we’re certainly not the only hotel guests who do this.
Anyway, we got back to our room one day to see our full trash can placed in front of our door, moved from where we’d left it when heading out. It seemed weird that housekeeping would see the trash can and simply move it rather than empty it.
When going back into our room, we noticed a sheet of paper had been slid under our door. It turned out this was a sheet they were supposed to have given us when checking in, but hadn’t. There was a section they’d both starred and highlighted:
As you can see, it says the following:
Garbage
Do not leave trash in the hall. Please take to outside dumpster on the south side of the hotel
Yes, that’s correct – the Candlewood Suites Idaho Falls refuses to take care of guests’ trash, instead expecting guests to carry it downstairs, out to the parking lot and then throw it in the dumpster themselves. This being Idaho, where the average low temperature is below freezing for 7 months of the year. Their trash policy is quite literally a trash policy!
What made this particularly ridiculous is that this policy is written beneath a section which once again asks for guests to send money to their staff, despite guests being expected to do their own housekeeping. Something else I should point out is that the hotel only offers housekeeping service on every 7th day of your stay, so it’s not like us declining housekeeping had affected them collecting our trash in the first place.
Although we thought it was weird that the hotel refused to deal with guests’ trash, we did respect their request to not leave our trash in the hallway. Instead, we piled it up neatly for them to dispose of at the end of our stay which shows that they are actually capable of dealing with guest trash as I doubt they left it there for the next people staying in the room.
What We Did
Spent Time With Friends
One of the main reasons we didn’t end up going out and about as much in Idaho Falls is because we got to enjoy spending time with friends several times while we were there instead.
Shae had met Greer when riding RAGBRAI (a bike ride from one side of Iowa to the other) back in 2022. We’d wanted a chance to meet up again which was one of the reasons we’d picked Idaho Falls as a place to visit in Idaho on the road trip.
We had such a wonderful time spending time with her, her husband and their friend, having several dinners together and spending many hours playing board games. We learned a few fun new games, plus played Settlers of Catan again which we’ve played quite a few times before with friends in Cincinnati and is one of our favorites.
Walked Downtown
Idaho Falls gets its name from the long span of falls along the Snake River.
There’s a nice trail along the river, including a Japanese Friendship Garden right next to the falls.
Idaho Potato Museum
The Idaho Potato Museum is about 30 minutes southwest of Idaho Falls and is a fun and quirky place to visit. As you might expect, it’s a museum dedicated to the history of the potato, particularly the history of the potato in Idaho because Idaho is the state that produces the most potatoes in the US.
Tickets are only $6 for adults, $5.50 for seniors, military and those with a AAA membership), $3 for children 5-12 and free for children 4 and under, so it’s very good value. You take a self-guided tour through the museum which has information boards, lots of potato-related exhibits and even a virtual reality section where you can wear a headset while riding on a tractor harvesting potatoes.
What made the experience even better is that the museum is pet-friendly. That meant Truffles was able to join us while we learned all about spuds.
Shoshone Falls
On our drive from Idaho Falls to Boise, we stopped at Shoshone Falls which is just outside of Twin Falls. These waterfalls are incredible; the photo below doesn’t do justice to how magnificent they are in person.
Where We Ate & Drank
Potato Station Café
The Idaho Potato Museum has the Potato Station Café which features – yep, you guessed it – all kinds of potato options on their menu.
Shae and I decided to try several of their delicacies – a bowl of potato soup, fresh cut fries, crispy tater dollars and an Idaho Spud candy. Here’s a video of us taste-testing them all.
The crispy tater dollars ended up being both of our favorites as they were delicious. They’re potatoes which are cooked, then sliced and fried. This gives them both a deeper flavor and a satisfying crunchy coating – delicious!
Candy Jar
An employee at the Idaho Potato Museum recommended that we visit Candy Jar across the street from the museum, so we headed over there afterwards. We got to sample some fudge and then bought a few little treats to take with us.
The most interesting candies were the small ones you can see in the middle of the box. They were huckleberry potato chocolate candies; the huckleberry flavor certainly won out over any kind of potato flavor, but they did have a slightly different texture to what you might expect which is presumably the potato in it.
Idaho Brewing Company
Just a couple of minutes walk from our hotel was Idaho Brewing Company, so we stopped off there for a quick drink on our way back from walking around downtown. We had Truffles with us and so we sat outside on their pet-friendly patio area.
I got a flight with their brown ale, scotch ale, porter and stout. I normally prefer darker beers, but in this case my favorite was their scotch ale as it was the most flavorful of the four. Shae appreciated that the brewery had wine as an option because she doesn’t like beer and some breweries don’t always offer wine.
Reed’s Dairy
One evening when we were hanging out with our friends, they took us out to get ice cream at Reed’s Dairy, an ice cream and dairy store with half a dozen locations around Idaho.
They had something like 20 different flavors to choose from. I always find it hard to choose which flavor(s) to get when there’s such a big selection like that because there’s usually at least 5-10 flavors I’m particularly interested in. I settled on two flavors that you rarely see elsewhere – huckleberry and honeycomb crunch. The honeycomb crunch has a graham cracker base, with a graham cracker swirl and honeycomb pieces. That flavor was nice, but the huckleberry was even better.
Shae always gets some variety of chocolate, so she picked a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of fudge brownie and thought both were delicious.
What We Missed
Another reason we didn’t end up doing as much in Idaho Falls is because a lot of the hikes and waterfalls we had on our list of things to do were apparently still going to be covered in snow and we don’t have spikes for our hiking boots. We’d also hoped to visit Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve, but its loop road – the main thoroughfare through the park – was closed until April.
Here’s what else we had on our list of things to do in and around Idaho Falls in case you’re planning a visit yourself when the weather’s nicer:
- Museum of Idaho
- Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve
- Fall Creek Falls
- Yellowstone Bear World
- North Menan Butte Trail
- Upper Mesa Falls
- Targhee National Forest
- Lava Hot Springs
- Diamond P GrassRoots Bison
- Museum of Clean
[…] eight days in Idaho Falls, we moved on to Boise for a total of nine […]