Day 10 - Sunday

Another early morning (up at 5am) but it was good to get out of that hotel (note to self – don’t try to save money on hotels!) Got through another round of security and it was off to board the flight to Boise. When people found out I was going to Boise, they would ask “What for?”. This, and the size of the plane (about 50 seats) gave me the idea that it is a smaller city.

Uneventful flight over a lot of desert. I kept expecting that since we were getting closer to landing that it would start getting greener, but no, Boise is in the desert too. There is water available for irrigation, so there is some lush green grass around, but I didn’t see that until driving around later.

Doug Church, from Pacific Press, and his wife, Melody, met me at the airport and took me to a nice buffet lunch first. Then it was off to see some of Boise. They have a lovely river running through the city that has a good walking/cycling track by it.

Similar to the Howqua river, shallow-ish with rocky bottom and trout

 

Then we went up a close mountain to get a look over the city. But there are bushfires in the mountains that are causing quite a haze and visibility was poor. 

Next stop was a to section of the Oregon Trail. Some of you may have studied the book Children of the Oregon Trail in high school as did I, so it was interesting to see the terrain they were crossing. There are still ruts left from the wagons, along with a “cut” that was used to get the wagons down from the high ridge to the valley. And it was hot, with a very dry wind.

They dropped me at the hotel, and I just did a few work emails, watched some TV, then walked to a close Mexican restaurant for dinner. On the return journey, I walked through what I thought were small, grey pebbles, but my shoes were still crunching when I got back to the footpath. Turns out I'd walked through a patch of "goat heads", which are a sort of burr with very large spikes. Had to pull out all the remaining spikes with a pair of tweezers when I got back to the hotel, glad I wasn't wearing thongs.