June 30 - Drive to Boise, Idaho

We had breakfast, dumped the gray and black water tanks, and were rolling back across the causeway to the mainland by 8:30 a.m., and that gave us a good early start for the day's drive to Boise. While we were climbing back up thru the pass between Utah and Idaho on Interstate 84, the landscape changed from the irrigated fields that are all around the cities beside the Great Salt Lake back into the arid desert landscape that seems to typify most of the inter-mountain valleys. I think that the higher mountain ridges create enough precipitation to support some trees and shrubs (other than sagebrush!), and those mountain ridges looked more lush or at least had some greenery to break up the otherwise monotonous brown and gray of the desert.

Back in Idaho the landscape continued to be essentially American desert until we connected with the Snake River valley where irrigated fields once again became common. We saw some corn, hay, and winter wheat. Corn surprised us because corn needs at least decent soil to grow and the soil looked pale and sandy to us. But we finally also saw fields of the famous Idaho potatoes! I had been looking for potato fields since we had crossed into Idaho from Montana, and this was the first I'd seen of them. We also saw a biplane crop duster coming right across the interstate in front of us, which was exciting. Dangerous flying, that, and altho I like flying low and slow I am not crazy enough to skim across a field and brush the treetops at the ends! A pilot could get hurt doing that.

We stopped off for lunch at Twin Falls, Idaho, where the Snake has cut a really spectacular gorge several hundred feet deep into the old rock bed of the plain. It really looked interesting and I wondered if there were any rafting trips down that mini-Grand Canyon or not, because it certainly looked like a fun thing to do, especially on a hot summer day! But we pushed on to arrive at Boise shortly after 3 p.m., which gave us as much time as possible to see Patience, Jake, and Patience's niece (my grandniece) Carrie who was visiting from Texas. We had a wonderful time that afternoon chatting and catching up with the family news in those branches of the family. What was curious was how I had to think about the labels to use when we spoke of family members, because the labels were different for me, Patience, and Carrie. For example, Lois is my sister, Patience's mother, and Carrie's grandmother, so when I referred to Lois I occasionally had to think if I should use the "my sister", "your mom", or "your Grandma" label in the conversation. Should you use your label or the label that the person you are talking to would use for a family member? My preference was the later, but that made me change labels when I switched from talking to Patience to talking to Carrie, which felt distinctly odd. What do other people in that fix typically do in multi-generational conversations? Do different cultures handle this linguistic dilemma differently?

Anyway, after a relaxed (and talkative) dinner, we played two games that I didn't recall ever playing before, Uno and Taboo. I think my boys had an Uno card game around the house when they were young, but I just don't remember actually playing it with them. In any case we had fun. Taboo was a kind of charades-like word game but had "prohibited words" that were essentially the common associations with the target word. Trying to use circumlocutions made us all sound, as Patience put it, really tongue-tied. The effectiveness of clues depended a whole bunch on having common background, so we had split the married couples to be on different teams. But Jake and I could use "guy stuff" just like Patience and Carrie could use "girl stuff" to get to the target word. Jake had the target word "Elf" and used the clue "Renault racing team car" so that I could get it on the first guess! We had lots of fun and finally rolled out to bed in the trailer parked outside a little after 10 p.m. for the end of a really nice day.