Boise, Idaho, United States
Boise ended up being the last stop on my southern Idaho
sojourn. I had been there once before on
my 2003 trip to western Canada and the Northwest and was reasonably impressed
with the city at the time. It struck me then
as having a very lively downtown for a relatively small city, including at
night on a summer weekend evening when the streets were filled with people in
what seemed like a pretty big bar and club scene. I don’t recall doing too much sightseeing
back then, but I left with a positive enough impression of it that I considered
it to be a possibility on my Top 10 list of potential places to live. That would be due to its location near the
mountains and decent skiing and hiking and also a quite dry climate with hot
season that isn’t too long.
Boise has for several decades been one of the fastest
growing metropolitan areas in the country, so it’s not quite the small city it
once was now that the population of the so-called Treasure Valley is around
700,000. And there does seem to be a
huge of amount of new construction, suburban sprawl, and even traffic in the
area. So I have no regrets about choosing a smaller city in Montana instead.
There doesn’t seem to be too much to see in Boise in terms
of major attractions. I naturally went
to the state capitol, something I didn’t do last time around, probably because
I was there on a weekend that time. It’s
one of those state capitol buildings modeled on the national capitol in DC and
is quite opulent inside.
Most state capitol buildings I visit impress me as
significantly nicer than the one I worked at for several years in Colorado. It always struck me that Colorado deserves to
have a more grandiose state capitol. The Idaho state capitol was close to
deserted while I was there in the late afternoon and there was no security
whatsoever. I could pretty much go anywhere
in the building, including into the house and senate chambers. One of the state’s political claims to fame
in recent years has been having the most lopsidedly Republican state
legislature in the country with a current 80%/20% split between Republicans and
Democrats in both chambers.
The other interesting spot I found downtown is the so-called
Basque Block, a city block of Basque-oriented restaurants and cultural
attractions. I guess there’s a Basque
social club and a jai alai fronton as well as the small museum I went to. I find Basque culture to be quite interesting,
having been to the region in Spain and France.
That members of the ethnic group managed to make it to the Great Basin
region where they first immigrated to be shepherds is also quite odd.
Boise is
considered to have one of the largest Basque populations in the U.S., not that
it’s very big part of the total population, though. I stopped for a drink at a restaurant named
Leku Ona and then had a Solomo sandwich of marinated pork and red peppers at
Bar Gernika. However, it wasn’t quite
the Basque cuisine experience I had been hoping for considering how fine the
food is in the homeland.
My original plan was to head to the Sawtooth Mountains and
Sun Valley area for some hiking and then finish up at Craters of the Moon
National Monument before heading home.
Each day, though, the weather forecast for the days I planned to be
there kept getting worse to the point where it was now under winter storm
watch. That wouldn’t be much fun to hike
in and probably even less fun to drive in in my Buick. After going to the Boise Zoo on Thursday afternoon,
I decided to head for home instead to get back across the Continental Divide
before the storm. When it’s sunny and
80* and you’re walking around the zoo in shorts, it’s hard to believe that
there will be a winter storm in two days, but that’s just weather in the West.
2025-05-23