kitchtrips

Nashville country nights, Detroit rock city lights
Arizona, California,
Texas desert, a Green Bay blizzard, Indiana, Louisiana

On the road lotta miles just to feel your smile
Girl I wanna touch you while I kiss your lipstick
Around the bend down the road, hop in out of the cold
Itchin’ to get my fix and kiss your lipstick

– Kip Moore

Sunday 12 May, 2024

I woke up just a little dusty and parched. Probably not enough water last night. But what a night!

The weather continues to play its part in Boise. Sunday – Mother’s Day – was warm and sunny, with scarcely a cloud in the sky. The temperatures are about right, high twenties (Celsius) with just the gentlest of breezes.

We went downtown to George’s Cycles on 3rd Street after breakfast and rented bikes. From that location, we rode past Zoo Boise to the nearest Greenbelt entry, turned right and headed out for just under 13km, following the Boise River through various impressive neighbourhoods, across bridges, through beautiful copses of trees that offered spectacular dappled sunlight, through sprawling parks (including one of my favourite places in this city, Esther Simplott Park and the adjacent Boise Whitewater Park) until we figured we should turn around, head back and find some lunch.

All of that with the foothills in the background. And, best of all, 99.9% of it is flat (only when you go up a ramp onto a bridge is there an incline), and I’d say about 90% is recently paved, so it is smooth and fast: easy riding. There were plenty of other riders and walkers out, some faster than us and some slower. Everyone did the right thing, which made it a stress-free experience. It was mostly easy to ride at the pace we wanted, except where there was some congestion near parks.

Whilst my watch said 25km, it really didn’t feel that far. Nonetheless, 25km is 25km, and at the end, we treated ourselves to a beer at Mother Earth Brewing near George’s Cycles on the way back.

Lunch was at a great Asian place called Zen Baja. I had a Vampire chicken taco (a flour tortilla with a crispy cheese “vampire” shell filled with verde chicken, shredded cabbage, Baja sauce, avocado, pickled red onions, and cilantro.) and excellent Santa Fe egg rolls (filled with chicken, black beans, red peppers, jalapeno and cheese, and served with avocado cilantro crema) as well. Really, really good food. And a lot healthier than some other options

A quiet afternoon, catching up on some blogging and reading. The pace of the last couple of days has been much more relaxed than Thursday and Friday, that’s for sure. This is supposed to be a vacation, after all.

Ate dinner at Olive Garden, which is a chain Italian restaurant that’s just okay, but their breadsticks are basically heaven, and they make any visit to OG worthwhile.

Watched Rambo (2008) tonight. Forgot how violent it is – all the bad guys meet decidedly bloody endings. Score one for the good guys. Just as well we have heroes like John Rambo in the world. (And I forgot how Sylvester Stallone garbles and grunts his words rather than really speaks them. Clearly, it isn’t costing him a paycheck!)