Couer d'Alene, Idaho

The GPS tells us that our campground is only two miles from the Idaho border. This is a new state for our travels out west, so we headed across the border one day. The best known Idaho town in this area is Coeur d'Alene. We had to have pronunciation lessons, as this little city was named by French fur traders, and it doesn't follow any of the phonics rules we learned in elementary school. The locals say something that sounds like "Core da Lane." The only thing harder to saying it correctly, is spelling it right. Again, it doesn't follow any of the English spelling rules.

The heart of the town is the beautifully blue Lake Coeur d'Alene where most tourists like us hang out.

There's a four-mile hike that circles Tubb's Hill on the edge of the lake. That means that for most of the hike we had that cool clear water on our right-hand side.

The town's mascot is a lovable moose. We were hoping to see a real life moose in these mountains, but this guy was the only "wildlife sighting."

The streets were crowded, and parking was at a premium in this popular resort town. On the beach of Lake Coeur d'Alene is a high-end hotel, with a matching marina. But the thing that sets the marina apart is its length. This is the world's longest floating boardwalk. You better believe that we walked all 3,300 feet of that boardwalk. That adds another 3/4 mile to our hiking for the day. We didn't play any golf today, but this resort also owns a golf course featuring the world's only floating green.

The Coeur d'Alene Spa Resort has some fancy flower beds. We have no idea how many red geraniums it takes to fill such a large area. This might be some record-breaking number as well.

As proof that this is a high-end city, Denisa had to take a picture of the port-a-potty on the less-traveled end of the trail. We had never seen such a fancy potty building to cover a usual eye-sore.

In case we hadn't gotten enough urban exercise on this warm summer afternoon, we also went for a bike ride. In Spokane we had ridden on the Centennial Trail, and it stretches for over 40 miles all the way across the Idaho border. We rode a few of the miles on the Centennial Trail that run right beside Lake Coeur d'Alene.

That took us all the way to the Veterans Memorial Bridge. It's hard to tell how tall this bridge is, but that is an 18-wheeler crossing high over the water.

We had heard a lot about the town of Coeur d'Alene, so we were glad to spend the day here. We felt like resort tourists taking in all the photo ops around town. We originally had planned to camp close to all this fun, but the crowds had already filled up all the campgrounds.

After a sweaty afternoon of exercising our way around Couer d'Alene, we were ready to go home to our calm little campground on Liberty Lake. We don't have fancy dandelion sculptures there, but we do have peaceful hikes away from hordes of tourists. After a day among the summer crowds, we'll take Liberty Lake instead.