July 3 - Boise, Idaho - Volksmarch

This was our day to walk the Boise Volksmarch, so after a quick breakfast we headed downtown to the YMCA that was the starting point for the walk. Patience and Jake had elected to join us, and Patience acted as a quasi tour guide during the walk, giving us some extra information about the things we along the way. The Boise club sponsors 4 different Volksmarches and 1 Volksbike in the area, so you could fly in and spend an entire weekend just walking and biking around the city. Since we were taking credit for walking in the state capital, I thought we should take the walk that included the capitol building on the route. Interestingly, this walk also featured 3 microbreweries, so there were plenty of opportunities to stop off and hoist a cold one along the way!

From the YMCA we headed right over to the capitol building, which Patience said was built with the same layout as the US capitol, except on a 2/3 scale. It certainly looked nice, and there was even a flower bed in the shape of the state of Idaho on the front lawn.

From the capitol we walked across the downtown to the Greenbelt, a hiker-biker trail that runs along the Boise River for many miles. As we joined the Greenbelt, we passed thru a small park dedicated to Anne Frank, the young girl who died during the holocaust but left a gripping diary of her experiences hiding from the Nazis. The park had rather evocative statues of her and was very pleasant except that we were accosted by one of the street people living there, and he just wouldn't let us alone.

We continued along the Greenbelt for maybe a mile before turning back into town at one of the aforementioned microbreweries. The Boise River was right up to the top of its banks when we were there and the water looked about as cold as you would expect snow melt to be, but Patience said that a lot of folks will go tubing in the river, especially later in the summer. The next point of interest on our walk was an old log cabin belonging to the founders of Boise, the O'Farrel family. The cabin itself was closed, altho Patience said the Historical Society opens it on special occasions, but the plaques beside it recounted a quite remarkable life. O'Farrel pater had originally been a seaman, sailing around the world, then a gold prospector and then engaged in business in Salt Lake City where he seemed to finally be successful. I'm just judging that because the picture of the O'Farrel's second house in Boise looked to me like almost a mansion, which was quite a step up from their original one room log cabin!

Continuing north thru the city we jogged left at a nice park with tennis courts, play areas (for humans and dogs), and bathrooms. After a couple of more jogs thru a nice residential district we arrived at the third and final micro brewery at the north edge of town and turned back toward south along a wide boulevard with a grassy sward and trees in the center. It was clearly an upscale part of the city, and Patience said this was known to be a great place for trick or treating on Halloween, so all the kids would come here. We also passed a house with two lion statues on either side of the sidewalk, and Patience told us about the previous owner who had dressed the lions up with clothes that changed with the seasons. Their summer outfit apparently included sunglasses and a pitcher of lemonade, so this must have been quite something to see, but the new owners have dispensed with such frivolities and let the lions stand unadorned at their sidewalk stations. Some folks just have no sense of tradition! This kind of local color is fun to have while you do a walk, and some clubs will write such tidbits into their walking guides for the Volksmarches; I've always appreciated those additions to the basic scenery and points of interest in the different cities we have walked in.

This was a 12 kilometer walk, and we passed thru a small historic area with shops around the 10 kilometer point and decided to stop for lunch at "Harry's". We do, after all, walk to eat as well as eat to walk! I had the Hawaian special, which was a sandwich with a grilled chicken breast, bacon, cheese, and a layer of pineapple together with the usual lettuce, onions, and the whole thing dripping with barbecue sauce. I found it a messy thing to eat, but it tasted wonderful. You work up such an appetite on these walks that you really do appreciate food quite a bit more, I think, than folks who don't exercise and eat when they aren't really all that hungry. From the restaurant it was a short stretch bake to the YMCA where we turned in the envelope with our start cards and the $3 fee for getting official credit. We enjoyed our walk in Boise very much and altho I know that part of that enjoyment was having Patience and Jake along I would still feel comfortable in recommending this walk to others. We didn't have the chance to walk the other routes, but I must admit I was curious about where they went and I imagine that if you walk all 4 routes you will have a pretty good first hand acquaintance with Boise!

Returning home for the afternoon, Jake reassembled the canvas pieces to their pop up camping trailer. The rest of us helped where we could and otherwise watched Jake painstakingly fit the canvas into the grooves and then screw it all down to keep it in. It was a fascinating, but it also took quite a while and I could see that if you didn't do it just right you could easily rip the canvas, screens, or zippers. It looked great when Jake got it all together, but I'm not certain I would like to tackle something like that myself, at least not without Jake's help. If by this time you are getting the impression that Jake is a really, really handy person to have around when you are trying to get something done, you would be correct.

We finished the afternoon washing off the vinyl-clad sections of the canvas that are over the beds on the ends. We took the opportunity to also wash the front of my trailer, which had accumulated a fair amount of dirt plus quite a collection of dead bugs in five thousand miles of travel. Jake grilled some thick, juicy porkchops for dinner, after which we all just kind of settled down for the evening; I wrote in the journal a bit while Monika answered our email on Patience's computer. We finished off the evening, as we usually do, by reading a bit; I read some of Baxter Black's rodea cowboy escapades in "Hey Cowboy, Ya Wanna Get Lucky?" while Monika read "Belles On Their Toes", which is the sequel to the "Cheaper By The Dozen" book about the Gilbreth family.