We can hardly bare to leave Bear Lake

It's nice to be traveling after Labor Day, when many popular campgrounds are less full. We are staying at a particularly nice Utah State Park on the south end of the particularly nice lake. We love the view from our camp site that is right on Bear Lake! These sites are usually booked up months in advance during the summer, but after Labor Day they become first-come-first-served sites and even go down in price. So arriving during the week gave us this lake-view full-hook-up site. This is our view out one of our motor home windows. Nice!

Mark found a well-reviewed hike in the National Forest that surrounds the lake, so we headed up Logan Pass to the Limber Pine Trail. This area gets lots of snow during the winter, and young trees can get weighted down and spend their first couple winters horizontal under the snow. So when they get big enough to grow vertical again, they have a curious horizontal section close to the ground.

They make for great spots to sit or take interesting pictures.

This is a nature trail, complete with signs that explain the nature that we are enjoying. It told us how the trees got their unusual shapes in the pictures above. The signs also told us about these unusually old limber pine trees that are found in this forest.

We finally found the tree designated as the oldest of them all. Someone isn't proof-reading the signs on the nature trail, however, because we found one sign that aged this tree as 2,560 years old. . .

and another aged it as 560 years old. It must be a female tree that doesn't want to tell her real age.

The sun was getting low in the sky as it was time to finish up our loop hike before we ran out of sunlight.

We were still up on the mountain pass when the sun sunk below the mountains here in Utah.

The next morning we spent some time enjoying Bear Lake. Usually we would be in our kayak on the lake, but we have some wind kicking up white caps.

This lake is big enough that those waves bring up the shells of tiny water creatures that live here.

Denisa used some of those shells to spell out the lake's name on the beach.

More inventive neighbors used shells to outline parts of the sand tortoise they sculpted on our beach.

But we still think that God is the best sculptor, making continuously-changing parallel curved lines of sand under the perfectly clear water of Bear Lake.

While we usually spend our days hiking and kayaking, tonight we have a date! That includes a stop at LaBeau's Drive-in in the little town of Garden City, Utah. We got in the surprisingly long line to order their "world-famous raspberry shake."

Mark took a bite before Denisa could snap a picture. But we both agree that it was world-famously-delicious! We were sad to find out that we had just missed the raspberry festival here in Garden City.

Since the line at the drive-in was longer than expected, we had to eat our raspberry shake on the run. We were on the way to the performance at the Pickleville Playhouse. This theater was built in 1977, and members of the Davis family have been writing and performing original musicals here ever since.

We got the last two tickets in a now sold-out performance that we completely enjoyed. They were even live-streaming it to paid subscribers, as this theatre has quite a following. It was even more fun because we were sitting beside the parents of one of the lead actors. Mom and Dad filled us in on the background of the theater and the cast, and the amazing family that started this little piece of fun entertainment in the Bear Lake community.

After a relaxing two nights of full-hook-up luxury, we'll be heading down the road tomorrow morning. But we can hardly bare to leave the fun at Bear Lake!