So as you may or may not know my family spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in a yurt on Tamarak resort. I don't like traveling and I would have much rathered stay home for Christmas but we went anyway and I did have fun. The following is a summary of key events.
On the way to Donnelly we listened to a lecture on domestic violence. The speaker told all kinds of stories from women in the US pushed around by their husbands to women in Muslim countries who get sprayed with sulfuric acid if they allow their faces to be seen. Then my mom and dad proceeded to give us the same lecture that my mom has given several times. “If your boyfriend tries to control you, frightens you, intimidates you, or hurts you in any way; that is the end of the relationship and you never speak to him again. If your husband does any of those things you take your kids and all the money in your accounts and leave him. The first time.” I absolutely agree.
Finally, just outside of Donnelly, we go to the hot spring that was our first destination. The hot spring is situated in a beautiful spot, deep in the mountains. The hot spring is surrounded by trees, rocks, and in this weather, snow. Changing into our swimming suits in the dressing rooms (which were in a yurt) was freezing. It was even colder to dance across the deck and snow to the lower hot spring which was not quite as hot as the highest one. Getting in the first time was torture. My toes, frozen from the snow, burned as I stepped into the hot water. I jumped right back out and stood on the side for a moment. Then I stepped back in and buried my toes in the sand at the bottom of the pool to escape the heat a little bit. I eased myself deeper into the water and eventually lay down and buried myself in the water up to my neck. We continued to play, take pictures, and move from pool to pool. Once we started at the very bottom pool, also the coldest one, and slowly moved our way up. It was an interesting experience. At first, the bottom pool felt really cold, then it warmed up just a little. When we started to feel cold we moved up a pool and repeated the process all over again until we finally reached the very hottest pool, well, not the hottest, but the hottest that I would go. When we’d finally had enough we all got out and went to put our clothes back on. For some reason it didn’t seem quite as cold as before.
Then we drove to the yurt. The yurt is on Tamarak resort and the setting is just as beautiful. My favorite part of the drive in was the entrance. There were lights to light up the circle and they looked like really big lanterns. They were hung from square posts. Everything looked really finished and nice which was probably what made me like it.
The yurt was more of the same. From the outside it really just looked like two oversized tents joined by a small wooden building, but inside it looked more like a small house. One yurt was three bedrooms and the bathroom. These rooms were divided by real walls and had real doors. The only downside was that the walls didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. They were only about seven feet high so any light or noise from the other rooms filtered into ours. The other yurt was the kitchen and living room. The kitchen was fully stocked with dishes and there was a disposal in the sink and a dishwasher! There were towels in the bathrooms and even movies under the TV. Not to mention that there was a TV with a DVD player in every room. We didn’t use these though. It was so hard to keep the yurts warm with forced air heating and one space heater per yurt that we spent most of our time in the kitchen/living room yurt. The one bad thing was that when we first arrived, half of the lights in the kitchen yurt wouldn’t turn on. However by the time that Dad, Carli, and I got back from getting batteries my mom had found a breaker or something and fixed it all by herself.
To get batteries we had to drive 15-20 minutes back to Donnelly, the nearest town, to the Stinker station which was luckily open on Christmas Eve. On our way we drove through a couple of patches of mist. It took us a while to figure out why the mist was only in certain places. My sister said it was magic hiding the goblin kingdom. My dad thought it had something to do with the lake. I just thought it was cool. I noticed another phenomenon that I thought was cool on our way back from the Stinker station. The snow on the sides of the road glittered like diamonds or Christmas lights whenever the snow hit it. It was beautiful.
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