Once we left the land of The Big Sky, we continued our journey westward. We entered a land of sand dunes, mountains, lakes and lava flows. We entered Idaho. The diversity of environments really took us by surprise. We also wanted to find a home base that would allow us to explore Idaho as well as places like Salt Lake City, Utah and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That’s when we found a great place in Southeast Idaho we called the Idaho Falls Ranch House.
Idaho Falls is a “just right sized” town, in our opinion. The population is about 59,000 people. This commonly creates an environment where all of your amenities are available and, often times, you have multiple choices for those amenities; grocery stores, big box retailers, restaurants, gas stations, etc. In addition, for the most part, a town of this size is not overly heavy on traffic. Sure, during times when you would expect traffic, the streets can be crowded. But the traffic seems to move fairly swiftly.
Not far from downtown, in Idaho Falls, you will find the Snake River Greenbelt. This is an area where the city placed walking paths, artwork and more along both sides of the Snake River, which runs through the city. There are multiple walking paths that allow you to exercise at varying lengths, whether you want a short stroll or to walk a few miles. The walkways will take you by a Japanese Stroll Garden as well as the feature the town is known for, the falls.
Mama Nomad and I walked from the Idaho Falls Ranch House down to the Greenbelt frequently. It was quite easy as the Ranch House was on a major street, with a paved sidewalk, in Idaho Falls. The house being in the main street means that quite a few cars pass by the house; this street is busy. However, it does give you instant access to one of the main arteries in Idaho Falls. The house itself was huge with 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms which were spread out across a main floor and full basement. I never asked, but it seemed like the house was over 3,000 square feet.
On the main floor, you will find a big living room complete with 70″ TV. You will also find the master bedroom with two walk-in closets. Since this house is on a main street, there is street light just out front of the house. This is great for added security. However, if you are a person that requires it to be completely dark when you sleep, bring an eye mask or sleep in one of the other 3 bedrooms. Right next to the master bedroom is an additional bedroom with an ample formal dining room just down the hall and a large kitchen. Off of the kitchen, there is an office space if you need to do any work. One nice touch that we appreciated was the positioning of labels on the drawers and cabinets. They let you know what was in that space so you did not have to walk around blindly looking in every cabinet and drawer for something.
Through the kitchen you will connect to the hallway that leads to the basement. In that hallway you gain access to the garage, bathroom #2 and the utility room, which has a washer, dryer and ironing board with plenty of room to put dirty clothes baskets on the floor. At the end of the hallway, before heading down to the basement, you will find the access to the backyard. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
Heading down to the basement you will walk through a maintenance area and access an additional living area. This is already setup with a TV and video games at one end. At the other end of the room is a bar and a pool table. The pool table has an attachment that can be placed on top to turn it into table tennis. We had many tournaments of both pool and table tennis downstairs. It was hours and hours of family fun! Connected to this living area is access to the 3rd bathroom and the other two bedrooms.
As I mentioned earlier, this place had a backyard and it was big enough to play around in. In one corner stood an apple tree. When we arrived, it was ripe and dropping apples. The property owner, Alex Hart, gave us permission to pick the apples. So, we ate 15 to 20 gallons of apples while we were there (we collected them in 5 gallon buckets). We had fresh apples and Mama Nomad even made fresh apple sauce a time or two…maybe three. Even with all of the apples that we picked, we could not keep up with how many apples this one tree produced. Next to the apple tree is a covered area and outdoor picnic table, which we used when we carved our pumpkins for Halloween. Stretched across the lawn was a volleyball net for those who enjoy volleyball. And, finally, there was a 4 burner, gas grill just outside the back door. The Nomads love to grill. So, this unit saw a lot of use.
The Idaho Falls Ranch House does have a couple of fireplaces, which we didn’t make use of as the house was quite warm for us. And, it had cable TV, which the boys enjoyed. For my work, as you know, I need a fast and reliable internet connection as well as good mobile phone signal. This place had both. The internet speed was consistently around 70Mbps to 80Mbps and I almost always had 4G mobile speeds.
Finally, a bonus comes with this house that we did not take advantage of; a free one hour ride on a Surrey Bike. It seats up to 8 people and has 4 pedals. Alex has it near the greenbelt, so you can take it for a spin and explore the area around the falls.
If you are looking for a spacious place to explore Southern Idaho, Northern Utah and Western Wyoming, then you should reach out to Alex and secure the Idaho Falls Ranch House. Just go to HomeAway and type in p866777vb into the search box. Tell them the Nomads sent ya. Safe Travels.
