July 1 - Boise, Idaho

We wanted to stretch our legs a bit after breakfast and Patience suggested walking along the old Oregon Trail track that runs along the Boise River valley. The emigrants faced two choices in their journey thru the valley. One was to continue along on top of the bluffs along the river valley, but there was very little water and poor grazing for the animals along that route. The alternative route was along the valley floor. That route had readily available water and lush grazing on the bottomlands along the river, but the big problem was how to get down the bluffs--there was no natural route.

But in the 1860s an entrepreneur named Kelton carved a sloping path from the top of the bluffs to the valley floor. It must have been a monumental undertaking, but it made the descent to the valley relatively safe and convenient, so it was a huge success. Since this is desert and things don't erode very quickly, I could clearly see the worn down grooves in the rock from the iron rimmed wheels of the immigrant wagons. Thus I finally got to see some of the ruts left over from that great westward migration, an important chapter in our country's history. I understand that you can see these ruts in other places along the route, but this was the first chance I had to see them "up close and personal", so to speak.

We returned to Patience's home for lunch and a quick rest as the temperature was rising quickly outside in the blazing sun. It was a dry heat, to be sure, and the air was still surprisingly cool when we were in the shade, but walking in the sun tended to sap our energy. Since this was the last day that Carrie would be in Idaho, we decided to do something fun for her and the rest of us, and that turned out to be seeing the film "Spiderman 2". Patience had purchased tickets the night before on the internet, so we just drove over to the theater, joined up with Patience's friend Sandy, picked up our tickets, and walked into the movie. It turned out to be lots of fun with True Love, Derring Do, and titanic battles between Good and Evil, all appropriate for a 13 year old. It even had a happy ending, so we were satisfied.

After the movie Jake joined us for a dinner at Red Lobster, and we finished off the evening by playing Taboo with Jake and Patience versus Sandy and Carrie versus Monika and I as teams. In many cases it is unwise to have husbands and wives on the same teams, but in this game having a shared history allowed the married couples to use indirect cues to elicit the right word from the teammate. Of course, that didn't always work; I emphasized "Trader Joe's" to Monika and she recalled everything we usually bought there EXCEPT the low-fat "peanut butter" that was the target word, so we ran out of time! But it was fun seeing folks beating around the bush verbally to try to get an idea across, and we all had a good time before turning in for the night.