We hung out here for the day at the  Lava Springs Mineral Bath Inn. It is a very old place and not kept up too well. It’s ten bucks more than the campsite and has everything in one place so we are down with it.

It’s sort of like belonging to a club. Room comes with an all you can eat for breakfast which is where we met the clan which is this huge white multigenerational family staying here for a family reunion. We pass them here and there around town which is six blocks of “Main Street”. We share a bathroom across the hall.

All the towns we’ve been in have their initials marked on a hill above, this is just the first time I’ve documented it.
There is native American influenced splashed around here and there as well.

The mineral baths pools, of which there are many of different temperature and sizes, are super relaxing. They have lots of minerals in them, those being manganese, calcium bicarbonate, sodium, zinc, sulfate, potassium, magnesium and fluoride.

The other BIG thing here is to “float” down the river in an innertube

When we were having lunch at the taco truck (after being told there was no Mexican food in town), we encountered a guy who had very badly scraped his foot so that clued us in about needing shoes when tubing down the quickly moving river.
We rented our innertubes, which were huge, and walked up to the put-in point of the river, resigned to soaking our specialized pricey bike shoes.
There is a reason you sign a piece of paper with lots of small print absolving the tube people from anything that may happen on the river. The lady explained that this is not a theme park tide but a real river with rocks and trees and such. We were told since we were new at this not to go down the difficult waterfall but we were clueless and went over everything because we didn’t know any better. It was super scary and fast and I could never get the thing to point in the right direction so I was continually swirling and going over rapids backward. All in all it was fun but too scary to do more than once and we were super glad we had our shoes which dried by dinner time in the intense sun.
After the “float” we had the massages I’d scheduled for Sa and I!  My neck and upper back feel locked into a permanent biking position and I’d been hoping for a massage for a while now.
It was the best oil massage I’d ever had! and that’s saying a lot since I’m at Esalen often.
This town is a strange mixture of conservative redneck (general area) and new age (mineral baths) and we’ve enjoyed it tremendously.
Here is another shot of the square scoop ice team shop. By the way, you never say “soda” in Idaho. It’s “pop”.