Barefoot on the Moon

 After dining on Ramen soup, a pound of western Oregon cherries, and an adequate supply of Full Sail ale from Hood River, I could have picked a "softer" place to camp than the Craters of the Moon National Monument. Good place for astronauts to practice walking; bad place to search for a privy in bare feet.

Originally known as Root Hog, Idaho, Arco is famous not only for the Sawtooth Club which serves many of the 900-plus residents their daily ration of grog, but also for being the very first town to be electrified by nuclear power-- in 1955. This was a benefit of being just up the road from the Argonne National Laboratory's National Reactor Testing Station. Unfortunately, the NRTS made further history in 1961 when it's reactor suffered a melt down, causing three deaths. It was the world's first fatal reactor accident.











Now known as the Idaho National Laboratory, it somehow seemed unwelcoming to tourists like me. Couldn't even buy a postcard.

The Rigby Bowling Lanes and Snack Bar in Rigby, Idaho, appealed to me as the sort of architectural monument to popular culture one finds when traveling the blue highways of America. I've come to expect it. What I did not expect was that Rigby claims to be "The Birthplace of Television." Seems Rigby High School student Philo Farnsworth drew up some early blueprints for a TV and later went on to develop the TV vacuum tube. But there's more: Rigby is also the home of Wayne Quinton, inventor of the treadmill. All of this on US Route 20!