Island Park, ID

Well, to provide a little bit of a background on our trip to Island Park, the idea all started several months ago.  Ever since DH and I have been married I have wanted to take a trip with him to Yellowstone National Park.  I visited a couple of times with my family while I was growing up and I always enjoyed those visits and have wanted to go back again and take DH and our kids too.  We have thought about taking the trip several times in the past and the timing has just never been quite right.  Well, once my surgery to remove my cancer was over and I was making it through the chemo treatments alright I decided that I wanted to take our family to Yellowstone this spring.  It looked like we would have most of the month of June available.  We have really enjoyed the recent family reunions that we have had with the N family, staying in vacation rental homes, so I started looking into possibly renting something near Yellowstone for our family.  After looking at some places and looking at the time frame that we had to work with we thought it might be fun to invite some family to come with us so the kids would have some cousins to play with.

We were already going to be seeing most of my family in July for a family reunion, so we decided to invite DH 's brother and his family who live near Spokane. It was several months ago that we mentioned it to them and they we really interested in joining us. The only tricky part would be scheduling it around my treatments.

After mentioning it to them I didn't start looking seriously at places for several weeks - I was just having a hard time finding the extra energy to make any decisions at that point. When DH's brother mentioned a few weeks later that they needed to know dates as soon as possible so he could request the time off work, I knew that I needed to start really looking at possible places and making some decisions soon. We emailed some ideas back and forth and I had set a date for when I wanted to Skype my sister-in-law and pick a place.  Well, that day came and I didn't really feel up for it so I let it go another day.  Then out of the blue the following day we got a call from our other sister-in-law that lives overseas in Indonesia right now and she mentioned that they were thinking of changing their summer plans and were considering coming out to the states during the month of June.  I mentioned our plans to go to Yellowstone and thought that the timing of everything was more than just coincidence.  (If I had gone forward with my original plan to call my sister-in-law the day before, we probably would have already booked a place.)  The dates that they were looking at for coming to the states was the exact same time frame that we were looking at for our trip and so we thought it would be a lot of fun to make this a possible family reunion for the N family.

I would have liked to have found a place in West Yellowstone, MT, but with it being so close to Yellowstone the prices were much higher there and they were filling up much quicker.  So we decided on Island Park, ID which isn't too far from West Yellowstone and seemed to have some good places in our price range that could fit all of us.  So after a lot of emails and a few phone calls and lots of internet searching we found a place that could fit all of us and that was available during the dates we were looking at.  I was a little bit nervous making all of these decisions since I have never done a vacation rental before and didn't know exactly what to watch out for.  After we decided on our top choice I went ahead and took care of reserving and paying for the place.  We reserved the rental cabin for 4 nights so we would check in on Monday and check out on Friday.

Up to this point we had been hoping that DH's parents would be able to come as well as his sister who lives in Arizona.  Once we made the reservation we emailed all of the details to them as well and hoped that everyone would be able to come.  Unfortunately in the end - due to some previous vacation plans and a car accident that DH's mother was involved in - neither of the parents were able to make it, but we were able to get his sister to join us.  She was able to get the time off of work and get some plane tickets as well.