Month: August 2021

Day 11: Utah Community Credit Union

Posted on by Bill

Traveling during Covid is interesting. We’re not eating inside restaurants at this point, especially not in Idaho or Utah where community spread is wide. We generally make sandwiches for lunch and eat outside of some Starbucks or other. We also have camp chairs we can set up if we want to eat at a rest area or in a park or wherever. Dinner is going to be more interesting. We’ll look for places with outdoor seating or maybe do take out and go back to the hotel.

Today we drove from Boise to Lehi, UT. We’re headed for Boulder, CO. The shortest and quickest way is through southern Wyoming. Cutting across CO is far more interesting but longer. So we are breaking it up into three short days instead of two long ones. Tonight we’re in Lehi, then Grand Junction, CO for one night and then a day of driving through the CO mountains to end up in Bouder.

Why Lehi? It’s past Salt Lake City, so we bite the bullet on traffic in the afternoon instead of during the morning of the next day. And, it’s near… In-n-Out Burger! Normally we would eat inside, but see above. So we ordered at the drive-through and took our food to… where? Hmmm. American Fork, yes that’s the name of a town, appears to be paved top to bottom, side to side with strip malls. No obvious green space. So we picked a strip mall, found an empty parking area and ate by the UCCU sign. Better than any sunset. Well, no.

American Fork, UT

Who cares? We had Double-doubles!

MIles drivenTime on the road
3665:03

Days 7 to 10: Boise, the city with no Covid

Posted on by Bill

No, not really. But you’d think so from watching people around town. Maybe a quarter of the people in the grocery store wear masks. The employees do. Mostly. And mostly properly. Restaurants are full. Theaters are open. It’s like the pandemic never happened.

Meanwhile, we wear our masks everywhere. We ate out on Saturday night, at Ruth’s Chris, but outside and even then we were a little nervous as the staff was not masked. We did have leftovers for dinner tonight!

On a more cheery note, we had a great time in Boise. We enjoyed the new park a half-block from our place. It’s called Cherie Buckner-Webb Park after woman who broke down many barriers in the Idaho legislature and has been a leader in the civil rights movement. The park has two particularly fun elements. One is Gentle Breeze, a massive, pink, metal tree. The leaves move with the wind; they have some kind of special hinge that lets them move freely.

Gentle Breeze in the Cherie Brucker-Webb Park

The second is a new, to Boise, coffee shop called Broadcast Coffee. We went three of four full days we were here. It’s really nice to sit in the park with coffee. Yesterday we saw a very large dog turn into a whimpering, quivering puddle of an animal sitting in his owner’s lap all because he was afraid of a three year old girl riding a scooter around the park.

The weather has been pleasent and our step counts are going up! We’re on the road four of the next five days, so step counts will drop again. 😒

The Capital City Public Market, a craft / food / art fair held in downtown Boise on Saturday mornings from April to October is finally back downtown. It’s previous location was restaurant row and has been taken over by outdoor dining. (So maybe some concessions to Covid were made.) But that means the market is right on the corner by our apartment. Convenient! We got some presents for friends and some small items for the yard and patio.

This was our fifth trip to Boise since the start of the pandemic. We had been coming here about once a month. Some of the things we used to do; eat in restaurants, sit in Starbucks, movies, shop, lots of in-person meetings, etc. are mostly off-limits for us at this point. We’re using our place more; spending more time inside, cooking more, etc. And we’re driving instead of flying. Looking forward, like everyone else, to getting back to normal…

At the grocery store, the check-out guy was rude, inaccurate and slow. I have to stop using those self-check outs!

Day 6: Mountain time (zone)

Posted on by Bill

Got to drop off the grandkids at Girl Scout camp and summer pre-school. The are very good at keeping their masks on. Then we headed for Boise. We can backtrack through Washington and Oregon (Spokane, Ritzville, Tri-Cities, Pendleton, Baker City, Ontario, Boise) for for about a hundred miles less, but about ten minutes longer we can drive down the west side of Idaho (Spokane, Lewiston, Grangerville, McCall, Boise.) We took the more scenic Idaho route. The views never disappoint. This is from a rest stop on 95:

Salmon River

That said, there are two significant construction projects along the way, so we’ll go back via the Interstates.

Dinner tonight at Tin Roof Tacos. Good food, cheap, open late and nice outdoor seating. OTOH their other location was closed fo Covid and staffing issues. So… there is that. Being from Washington State it’s a little confusing to be in a place where virtually no one wears a mask, not even the restaurant staff. The barista in Starbucks in McCall did have a face mask, but she wore it like a chin strap.

We’re hanging out here for four full days and then resuming the journey.

Miles drivenTime on the road
3757:01

Days 2 to 5: Chillin’ in the hood

Posted on by Bill

No travel days recently. We’re just hanging out with the grandkids and thier parents. We had a nice breakfast picnic on Sunday. We got gluten-free waffles at People’s Waffles and ate at Riverfront Park. The carousel is nice, but we made our way to the Garbage Goat. No, really. They have a mechanised, vacuum powered trash eater in the park.

Garbage Goat

We met a man playing a handpan. He was kind enough to explain the instrument and play some for us. It looks like an inverted steel drum but has a similar sound.

The kids played on the red wagon slide. I’ve ordered one for our house. No, just kidding! But I do have ideas for a slide that wife and contactor are both trying to talk me out of. Mal sehen as they say in Deutschland.

This would fit in the back yard, right?

So, all in all a mellow four days in Spokane. The M’s won twice. Got good food from Nudo and Kuni’s. (Still not eating in restaurants.) The weather is great, only a tiny bit smokey. Tomorrow we’re off to Boise.

If the adjective form of metal is metallic, what’s the equivalent for iron? Oh… how… ironic.

Day 1: On the road again. Finally.

Posted on by Bill

Ok, so we like to take a road trip every summer. And last year, well, you know, that thing happened. Not that things are all rosey again at the moment. But we’re on our way across a bunch of Western states for a few weeks. We have lots of masks, Lysol wipes and hand santizer and we plan to stay out of most indoor spaces. We will be staying in hotels for a total of eleven nights. We even bought some camp chairs so we can order take out and find nice places to sit outside and eat.

And of course testing… (Negative)

Day one was simple, from home to Spokane for several days with those little people, the um, um, granchildren! And their parents of course. Lots of traffic today. Apparently we were not the only people with this idea.

Miles drivenTime on the road
2864:39