Hi, I’m Laurel Briggs, born and raised in Idaho and have lived here the majority of my life. I was born in Driggs. Most people just know it as the valley but not that valley, like totally. I am the youngest of 3 and only girl, so no I’m not spoiled at all. My mother came to the states from Germany and met my Dad in SLC, she later became a US citizen. I grew up in Teton Valley, fishing and hunting with my brothers when they had to take me along, which was pretty much all the time. Had an amazing childhood, pretty much attended school with the majority of my classmates since Kindergarten. Graduated with a whopping 42 kids and am in contact with the majority of them still to this day. I moved to Utah to attend a travel agent school and that became my first career. To this day, I still plan travel at my work, vacations and business.
I married my high school sweetheart, Chris, and we are going on 34 years of marriage. We did a short stint in Utah and I was a travel agent and did some traveling to some great places like Hong Kong and Athens, We lived in Utah for our first 4 years of marriage then when we had the opportunity to move back to Idaho, we jumped at it. We did some more traveling to Ireland, a cruise. I’ve traveled to Germany with my Mom twice to visit family as the majority of her siblings and her Mother (who has since passed, her father passed away when I was young) still live in the same town! Those have been some of my favorite trips. I visited Berlin a few months after the wall came down, visited a concentration camp where I learned more about that time than I ever learned in school. We also traveled to some beautiful sites and visited with family, some of which is the only time I have seen them to date.
We have 1 daughter, Caitlin, who is 19 and amazing!! We adopted Caitlin after 10+ years of infertility junk and 3 years of trying to adopt and then deciding we should pull our papers. Thankfully, we procrastinated on that! Grateful for being a procrastinator. We got a call on Mother’s Day that our file had been chosen, then on Father’s Day, we got the call our little girl was born! We brought her home at 4 days of age and our life changed forever for the best. I worked full time for 99% of the time. I am grateful that I have worked for a company that is like family and having to leave at a moment’s notice has never been an issue and I still attended all her school events and activities with my camera in hand. In high school, she became involved in mountain bike racing, which meant we got involved. Summer was spent practicing and fall was for races, which meant we camped for most race weekends. I took the team pictures and enjoyed it thoroughly. Generally, I prefer landscape photography, but this was a lot of fun.
We have lived in Rigby for 28 years and live in the country. We raise a few cows, have had goats and a donkey, many horses, dogs and cats, also chickens. We have a garden and are expanding next year, including adding a high tunnel 3 season greenhouse. As Caitlin has moved out on her own, we are now empty nesters. At first, it was quite the challenge and somewhat sad to not have her home. This was a BIG transition for me. For the first bit, our home felt very empty, but we are slowly adjusting to the empty nest life. We got rid of our bumper pull camper and got a pickup camper that needs a little tlc but that will be fun. We want to really explore Idaho and see more than we have with just day trips. We spend a lot of time on our yard and garden now and have really become more involved than in the past. We still have our chickens and I am hoping for some ducks next spring, as I can no longer eat chicken eggs without stomach issues. We have 5 cows. Down to just our mini schnauzer, Spock, as our last lab, Timber passed away in November. Spock is our spoiled little “child”, who thinks he is the big dog of the place. We also have 2 cats, KitKat and Tiger.
