Idaho / Wyoming
(hi! this is a work in progress! more links coming soon)
The 4th and final month of our roadtrip took us to….Driggs, ID. When I told people where we were going, I got vigorous head nods at Palm Springs, Southern Utah, even Salt Lake City. I got a “huh” when I said San Luis Obispo but when I said Driggs, the universal response was “um, where?”. And honestly, I said that too when my wife’s best friend suggested we take our roadtrip up to the Wyoming / Idaho border.
Driggs is ideally situated at the base of the Teton range, about an hour from Grand Teton National Park and 2 hours from Yellowstone. But even more importantly, we had a free place to stay in Driggs! The aforementioned best friend’s parents live there part time and graciously offered to let us stay at their house. What on Earth possessed them to let us stay there with our 2 mangy kids is still something I haven’t figured out, but we happily took them up on their offer. Driggs was also the only house we had not seen (on Airbnb) and the only town we rode into having done almost no research. We basically showed up with 2 kids under 5 and hoped (prayed?) that we’d have enough room in the house and enough activities to keep everyone busy.
In what would surprise us both, Driggs ended up being our favorite spot for a few reasons
It’s quiet. The town is small but has enough to do
There’s bike paths everywhere. Literally, you want to ride your bike 10 miles to the next town over? There’s a path for that. Want to ride your bike to the distillery on the edge of town? GO FOR IT.
It’s got a “locals only” flavor to it. Which is usually pretty great unless you’re at a bar at lunch and everyone there knows each other and is massively hungover from the weekend (this may or may not have happened to us)
Here’s what I was telling someone the other day about Driggs: if I’m staying in the valley for a month, I’d 100% stay in Driggs again. But! If I were only here for a week and I wanted to get to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks pretty easily, I’d suck it up and stay in Jackson just because it shaves about an hour off your commute time to the parks.
Much of what you’ll see in the sections below are a combination of things in neighboring towns (Victor, Jackson, Alpine).
What to do
Grand Teton National Park / Jackson, WY
Yellowstone National Park
Grand Targhee Resort
Upper (and lower) Mesa Falls
Ride a bike to Victor, WY
Where to eat and drink
Royal Wolf
Teton Thai
Melvin Brewery (Alpine, WY)
Grand Teton Brewery
Grand Teton Distillery (yes, there’s a disillery)
Where to drink coffee
Rise Coffee House — I visited 15-20 different small, independent coffee shops on this trip and Rise was 100% our favorite. The pastries, the matcha latte, the sandwiches, DID I MENTION THE PASTRIES?
Butter Cafe