The Failure Patch

That's what I've started calling the fly patch on my fly fishing vest. You can usually tell how good the fishing was by how many flies are on my failure patch. If there are one or two, the fishing was pretty good. Three or four flies... I probably caught a couple. More than four: FAIL. No fish. Unless it's been a really long fishing day, but even then there are no guarantees.

Seth and I went out fishing on the Snake River over Thanksgiving break. The first day of fishing went well and we both caught several whitefish and a rainbow or two. The failure patch collected a couple flies, but remained pretty sparse for the most part. The second day of fishing did not fare so well. We both caught a couple fish during the span of several hours, but it took a lot of work to do so. By the looks of my failure patch, you'd think I came away skunked. Luckily the copper "Prince-of-a-Bugger" streamer I tied on to use while I made my way over to Seth when it was time to leave actually produced a nice rainbow. Good thing too. There wasn't much room left on my failure patch.

The Failure Patch

Oh and just for the record, I caught two fish at the same time. Two whitefish to be exact... one took my bitch creek nymph and the other took a green hornet. I am the master.

You'd look insane too, if you caught two fish at the same time.

Seth and a pervert brown. It got hooked in the butt.

Seth and his 17.5" brown. Got it right in the mouth with a white woolly bugger.

Spud Day

*All photos courtesy of Seth's wonderful brother Scott. Thanks!

For years I've been hearing about the infamous Spud Day in Shelley, Idaho. I've constantly begged Seth for the opportunity to experience the starchy goodness of free baked potatoes and mashed potato tug-o-war and this year I was given the honor of making the pilgrimage to Potato Land for this wonderful occasion.

To make the trip even more exciting, a couple additions were added to the list of activities and attractions. First, Seth's brother, Scott and his wife Amanda were going to be in town. They are currently living in Houston, Texas and have a baby girl on the way. Getting to spend some time with them was on the top of our list.

As great as Spud Day would be with Scott and Amanda around, we added yet another source of excitement. The Spud Run. Yes, we signed up for another 5k. I mainly wanted to do the Spud Run so I could get a shirt with potatoes on it, and let me tell you, I wasn't disappointed.

The Spud Run started early Saturday morning (7:30!) and it was pretty chilly outside. Seth and I were the only ones in the family that ran this 5k, which meant we had a lot of people there to cheer us on. For this race they gave us actual race numbers that we pinned on our shirts, which we thought was pretty cool. And the blue t-shirts with running potatoes on it were amazing. That all combined with a real starting gun was almost too much to handle. It was like a REAL race!

Pre-race with our numbers & a view of the legendary Spud Run t-shirt.

Everyone standing around freezing, waiting for the race to start.

I was pretty nervous during the morning of the race (like usual) and that anxiousness combined with an early cold morning made the run feel twice as long. I felt so shaky and weird for the first little segment that I thought about dropping out. But, I told my body to just keep going and what do you know? I made it!

And the race begins... notice the Potato mascots in the road.

Seth and I ended up coming in one second apart... 28:08 and 28:09. A new record! Although in the "Shelley Pioneer" and on the Shelley website, everybody's times are 2 minutes off... it shows our times as 26:09. Which would be super fast for me. But I'm not complaining. Especially because once again I came in 5th place out of all the women! WOO HOO!! I don't know how that happened! Maybe this is an unconscious tradition? I'm not sure what place I was in my age group. Seth came in 17th place out of the guys, but the men put up some pretty stiff competition. Still, there were 114 runners, 48 men and 66 women, so we both did awesome. We were in the top 25%!

Seth coming through the finish line. I got confused and went in the wrong lane.

Seth had to hold up my arm. I was too tired to do it myself.

After the race we went and watched the Spud Day Parade. Neither of us had been to a parade for years. It was fun watching all the kids chase after the candy thrown from the paradees. We also had a famous family member in the parade! Arielle was on a float with her middle school volleyball team and looked pretty cool in her red and black uniform. We made sure to throw her some candy because apparently that's what the kids do these days when they see a float they like.

When the parade was over Seth and I went and checked out the park where all the booths were set up. It was really crowded and the line for the free baked potatoes was huge, so we ended up leaving. Luckily it was Tessa's birthday party that night so we got to have a baked potato and a funnel cake over at her house.

As would be expected, our free time was filled with fishing trips. I didn't catch a fish the whole weekend, but at least I got to fish the Snake River and the Henry's Fork. You can bet I'll be back and next time I'll be taking names.

On Monday before we left for home, we went up to Harriman State Park. Seth and I got there a couple hours early to fish (this was the Henry's Fork trip I mentioned above). We were hoping to hear some elk bugle and were lucky enough to hear a few loud calls when we first arrived. It was pretty cool.

The rest of the family showed up a couple hours later and we did a small hike around the park. We didn't hear anymore elk but we did see some deer and a couple beautiful lakes.

A cute pregnant Amanda on our Harriman hike.

We had a great long weekend up in Idaho and Spud Day was all I have ever dreamed it would be and more. I'm sure we'll be back again.

Thanksgiving

This year Seth and I spent Thanksgiving with his family up in Idaho. It was nice to have a long weekend to just relax and hang out doing what we like most.

We didn't have our Thanksgiving dinner until Friday so we went out trolling on Thanksgiving Day with Seth's dad on Ririe Reservoir. It was a beautiful day and we almost had the lake to ourselves. It was my first time fishing from a boat and I found it very relaxing slowly gliding across the water with my line in the water, looking around and enjoying the scenery. We actually spotted a golden eagle sitting in a juniper tree near the shore of the lake.

We ended up catching 5 cutthroat/rainbow hybrids and 1 kokanee salmon. It's definitely something I'd like to do again.

Friday was pretty packed with activity. Collette and Rachel's families had both done Thanksgiving the day before and apparently it's a family tradition to go rabbit hunting on the day after. Marty, Arielle, Seth, Grandpa Hanson, and I were the only ones who ended up going because most of the others had to stay back and work on Thanksgiving Dinner #2 (or they weren't big on huntin' wabbits). I didn't know about the tradition and Seth had forgotten about it, so neither of us brought our guns. Luckily Grandpa Hanson was nice enough to let us borrow some of his.


We decided to go hunt out between Sage Junction and Mud Lake. We chased out a handful... 2 jackrabbits, 1 snow hare, and a cottontail, but didn't get off a good enough shot to take any of them home. One of the Smith's grazed the snow hare, but after trying to follow the blood trail for a while, we gave up and let him go.

Am I dreaming or is that a really hot chick with a gun?

We got back from rabbit hunting just in time to help finish up the last couple dishes for Thanksgiving dinner. The food turned out amazing and of course we all ate way too much and had a great time doing so. Grandma Hanson's turkey was delicious and Rachel was the most talented turkey carver we'd ever seen.

On Saturday Seth and I went out fly fishing with Grandpa Hanson on the South Fork of the Snake River. It was a rainy/snowy day but it was fun nonetheless. We caught mostly whitefish and a couple browns. Of course Grandpa out-fished both of us. Every time we looked over he was reeling in another one!

We spent the rest of the weekend catching up on old "Perfect Strangers" episodes with Grandma Hanson, saw the giant trevache (catapult) that the Smith's built, and met up with a couple of Seth's old buddies. Oh and we also found out that Gracie LOVES road trips (OK not really).

It really was a great weekend and as usual we were sad to come home. We can't wait to go back up to Idaho again soon!