My visit to the beautiful Bear Lake Valley!

This week I had the opportunity to do something a little different for work, i.e. to make a two-day visit to the beautiful Bear Lake Valley. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there before, but it’s breathtaking! This is one of the first things you’ll see as you come into the valley through Logan Canyon.

Of course anyone familiar with this are knows what Bear Lake is most known for. That’s right, raspberries!  During the Raspberry Days Festival in August, the population of Garden City swells from 600 to over 25,000. Is that crazy or what? Yes, I couldn’t resist trying one of the famous raspberry shakes on my way out of town. And there’s plenty of charming snack shops to choose from. I just happened to choose La Beau’s this time.

I have to be honest and admit that I’ve only been to Bear Lake twice, but I sure do love it! I’ve never been further than Garden City so I enjoyed passing through the three or four small towns on my way to my ultimate destination, Montpelier. A few of the sites I enjoyed seeing.

Apparently one of the designers or builders (I can’t remember which) is from St. Charles, Idaho. This is a brand new monument they just created in his honor. His name is Gutzon Borglum.

You’ve gotta love small town hospitality. This is a fantastic restaurant we visited called the Paris Grill. We didn’t get to eat there, but they still took great care of us. We tasted a fabulous cookie made with lemon and white chocolate macadamia nuts. So delicious! I’m posting pictures here to make you jealous.

The Paris Tabernacle was built in 1888 and apparently last year they welcomed 50,000 visitors who toured one of the oldest buildings in the city. Incidentally, the walls in the Paris Grill were designed to match the exterior of the Tabernacle. Pretty cool, huh?

To wrap up this rather long post, Montpelier has signs everywhere warning you to watch out for bears, so I couldn’t resist being a little silly. The other picture is one of our Idaho radio stations who plays our “Speaking on Business” spots. We enjoyed visiting him, and my supervisor was even on the air for about 15 minutes talking about an Idaho campaign we’re starting.

From these pictures it probably looks like all we did was sightsee, but I promise we were incredibly busy. We met with about 16 business owners in just over 24 hours, so needless to say, we’re both pretty exhausted. What a great trip it was, and I loved seeing a beautiful part of my home state.