and on...to Heber City

East of Midway, you run into Heber, a cute little town with its own high school. Granny’s (a vintage house converted into a malt shop) is famous for its ice cream and shakes. There used to be the Wagon Wheel Café where you could slide into those red-leather seated booths with the gold upholstery-tacked edges and order a terrific home-cooked meal, but we didn‘t see it last trip through town. At the north edge of Heber, not quite on the actual main road but set back in a little ways, there is the wonderful little throw-back-where-you-can-find-things-you-can’t-find-anywhere-else-in-the-world-store, technically named Kings. It is indeed the king of all stores wonderful. The basement is entirely given over to toys and games, treasures like: bags of marbles and bins of hula hoops, little girls Cinderella slippers with pink feathers and diamond-looking beads, boxes and boxes of puzzles, stick horses, stuffed animals, cap guns & caps, sheriff's badges, bottle rockets, plastic dinosaurs and boats, inner tubes for bikes, model car sets, kites...you name it…Kid Nervana. I have literally spent hours (totally unregretted) of my life on the main level looking through the approximate 10,000,000 items, like: wind-up music boxes, Indian ceramics, wind chimes, Mexican jumping beans in little wooden boxes, little mirrors that say things like “Mother, I love you”, baby clothes, sunglasses, garden décor, popcorn, finger nail polish, stationery sets, spinning pinwheels, kitchenware, clothing dye, dangly earrings, watches, radio sets, batteries, hoses, magnets, nets for catching butterflies, metal napkin holders for those lousy napkins you have to dig out at little cafes, lemon drops, pillowcases you can embroider with the little hole-punched edges for you to crochet, embroidery thread and yarn, pins and needles, needles and pins, lace, thimbles, post cards... Oh, it’s a treasure trove of discovery, like something you’d imagine inside Snoopy’s doghouse that stretches to the size of your imagination! There is another King’s store in Preston, Idaho, and my children would have thrown a mutiny had I not stopped there one way or the other on each and every trip. That Kings has a back entry, and before I could clear the door, the kids were all running down the aisle headed for the basement. I’d have run with them, but you know about the knee thing.

On the trip home, you can’t relax at all because of the assault on one of your senses, namely your eyes. For an example of what I’m talking about, here are a few pictures snapped on the way home from the doc the other day. Keep in mind that they were taken through the inside of a raindrop-covered windshield by someone who had a little Lortab in her system, and no, I was not driving. Every single trip it is a beautiful sight, summer, winter, spring and fall, but this time it was breathtakingly magnificent!